Courtney Luckhardt (Ph.D. '11) Wins Prestigious Fellowship in Tübingen

In July we posted the great news that one of our Ph.D. candidates, Jeffrey Berland, would be joining the University of Tübingen's Center for Advanced Studies for a six-month postdoctoral fellowship as part of their program "Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages."

We are proud to announce that we also have an alumna involved in the project: Dr. Courtney Luckhardt, Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi, has been invited as a scholar-in-residence for the spring. 

Within the framework of the Center for Advanced Studies, scholars from different disciplines investigate the phenomenon of migration and mobility in the Mediterranean region and Europe in the period between 250 and 900 A.D. Its aim is to restructure the intensive research debate on this epoch-defining phenomenon by testing innovative approaches, methods, questions and explanations.

The program is directed by Mischa Meier, Professor of Ancient History; Steffen Patzold, Professor of Medieval History; and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner, Professor of Ancient History.

About her project: "My current research project seeks recover the histories of early medieval migrants and diverse communities at a crucial moment of cultural interaction and change. The different peoples that encountered one another during a period of intense cultural transformation in the eighth through tenth centuries reshaped the former Roman province and Visigothic kingdom of Gallia Narbonensis into the Marca Hispanica, the border region between the Frankish Empire and the Umayyad Andalusi caliphate. The question that animates my work is how both migrants and locals used legal, economic, and religious tools to create new communities in a territory that shifted between the political authority of Visigothic kings, to Andalusi emirs, to a Frankish regnum during the early medieval period. These relatively rapid political changes led to a transformation in not only royal and comital authority, but also at the level local communities."

Congratulations to Dr. Luckhardt!