Teresa Shawcross

Teresa Shawcross is a historian of the Byzantine Empire and the Mediterranean World in the Middle Ages. Her first book (The Chronicle of Morea: Historiography in Crusader Greece) focused on the Crusader States, and discussed the evolution of the representation of identity in medieval historical narratives composed within a volatile region where different ethnicities were obliged to live alongside each other and outside political interests frequently intruded. Currently interested in medieval theories and practices of empire, she is completing a book on the late Byzantine Empire (Nightmares of Empire: Memory, Legitimation and Power in the Eastern Mediterranean, 13th-15th Centuries). She is also working on an edition and translation of the writings of the Italo-Byzantine political theorist and statesman Theodore Palaeologus, and conducting preliminary research for a monograph, tentatively entitled Cosmopolitan Networks in an Age of Revolutions: Ruling the Mediterranean World at the End of Empire, that seeks, by comparing the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires, to analyse the collapse of imperial authority and the transformation of transregional power networks. The recent award of a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation will enable her to explore in the future the interaction of Mediterranean with Central Asiatic history.

Professor Shawcross received an interdisciplinary education, earning her B.A., M.Phil. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, and her Maîtrise from the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. She held a Hannah Seeger Davis Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Princeton University and a Research Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, while her last position was that of Assistant Professor of Medieval European and Mediterranean History at Amherst College. She returned to Princeton in 2012, joining the faculty of the History Department and the Center for the Hellenic Studies. At present, she is on sabbatical leave as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge.