University of Cambridge

Graduate Student, Archaeology

Benefactors of St John's College PhD Scholar

St John's

Thesis Title: The Archaeology of Colonialism in the Medieval Irish Sea Zone c.400 to c.1400

About

I am currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Archaeology in the University of Cambridge. My PhD examines the processes, bot political and cultural, associated with colonialism by examining the the changes in the control over ideological, military, economic and political resources as evinced in settlement form and patterning in the landscape of medieval case studies in Argyll (Scotland), Dyfed (Wales) and eastern Ulster (Ireland).  For my previously completed research MPhil I did the same in the south-east and mid-west areas of Ireland in the Viking and Anglo-Norman periods.
My background is in history and archaeology (BA) and sociology (HDip), and I utilise the approaches of each of these disciplines in my research, along with approaches gleaned from geography, anthropology, literary theory and linguistics.  There is much to be gained from such a broad multidisciplinary macro-level approach, as I feel that present day is suffering from a crisis of synthesis, and while there is much important scholarly activity being conducted, there is a need for more aggregate narratives dealing with large temporal and spatial scales.
I have also published or researched on such diverse unrelated topics as Neolithic rectilinear houses, the use of literary texts for anthropological history, and the sociology of Jansenism, and retain an interest in these areas. I am also interested in deep structure and the interplay of humans' biological and cultural programming.

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