Professor Martial Staub
L. ès L. (Paris I), M. ès L., D.Hist. (Paris X), Habilitation (EHESS/Paris)
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
Professor of Medieval History
Internationalisation Officer
SRDS Director
+44 114 222 2572
Full contact details
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
- Profile
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I attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay/St Cloud and took my degrees at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, the University of Paris X Nanterre and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Before joining History at Sheffield in 2004, I was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute of History at Göttingen in Germany.
- Research interests
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My research areas include: the history of the Church in the Middle Ages, late medieval European history with a focus on the cities of South Germany and Italy, the history of medieval philanthropy and endowments, all areas in which he is widely published (for a comprehensive publication list, click here). I am also interested in historiography (I was part of the White Rose Network project 'The Making of the Middle Ages') and French and postcolonial theory. These interests converge in the history of exile and, more recently, the history of spatial mobility, in which I have developed collaborative projects, starting with the Sheffield Exile Project that he set up in 2005.
I am co-director of the new Centre for the Study of Abrupt, Violent and Traumatic Change of the University of Sheffield. I am currently working on a collaborative project on spatial and social mobility in Europe in the Middle Ages and on a monograph on ‘The Global Citizen, 1200-1600’, which aims to understand how a decentralised society like Latin Europe was able to create a global world by looking at the role played by citizens and citizenship in this development.
- Publications
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Books
Edited books
- The Making of Medieval History. York Medieval Press.
- Brill's Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Brill.
Journal articles
- Communicating the Untimely: Pope Benedict XVI's Resignation and the Second Franciscan Age. Javnost - The Public.
- Der Vikar. Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, 2017(1), 19-26. View this article in WRRO
- A Companion to Mysticism and Devotion in Northern Germany in the Late Middle Ages. German History, 33(1), 132-133.
- Climate Variability and Societal Dynamics in Pre-Colonial Southern African History (AD 900-1840): A Synthesis and Critique. Environment and History, 20(3), 411-445. View this article in WRRO
- "’Im Rücken die Ruinen Europas’: Katastrophendenken zwischen Augustinus und Heiner Müller”. Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, 2014(1), 34-43.
- The Hidden and the Naked: Heresy, Exile and the ‘Truth’ of the Archive. Parallax, 19(4), 74-83.
- D’Avray, D. L. Medieval Religious Rationalities: A Weberian Analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 208 pp. $29.99 (paper).. The Journal of Religion, 91(4), 561-563.
- Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory and Forgetting in France 500–1200. French History, crv090-crv090.
- Religion des Exils und Exil der Religion. Archiv fur Kultur-geschichte. View this article in WRRO
- Trust, Globalisation and Citizenship in Renaissance Europe:
The Case of the South German Merchants of Lisbon Around 1500. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte. View this article in WRRO
Chapters
- In the Beginning was Migration… Borders and Transitions in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Europe In Hutton R (Ed.), Medieval or Early Modern: The Value of a Traditional Historical Division (pp. 85-103). Cambridge Scholars Publishing View this article in WRRO
- Making the Past Human: Archaeology, History, and Myth In Boyd M (Ed.), Festschrift J.C. Barrett View this article in WRRO
Book reviews
- Das Konstanzer Konzil als europäisches Ereignis: Begegnungen, Medien und Rituale. German History, 34(2), 326-328.
- The Making of Medieval History. York Medieval Press.
- Research group
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Research supervision
I welcome research students working on European history from 12th to 16th century as well as students with an interest in the history of migration and exile, the history of ideas and the history of historiography.
- Current students
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Primary Supervisor
Second Supervisor
- Completed students
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- Diego Palombi - Gender, perception and knowledge in the Old French and Latin Seven Sages of Rome
- Dan Murphy - Hoc est enim corpus meum: The Church in the Medieval Imagination, 1100-1170.
- Elizabeth Goodwin - Communities on the Move: The Transformation of Communities of Women Religious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England.
- Julia McClure - Inventing New Worlds: A Franciscan Reflection.
- Simon Hosie (MPhil, second supervisor) - Cataloguing the Empire: The Regionary Catalogues and the Role and Purpose of Bureaucratic Inventories.
- Mark Critchlow (second supervisor) - League Memories: Recollections of Catholic Political Engagement in late Sixteenth-Century Paris.
- Ben Lacey (second supervisor) - Constructing Communities: Identification and Self-understanding in the Twelfth-Century North of England.
- Robyn Parker (second supervisor) - Creating the 'Hermit-Preachers': Narrative, Textual Construction, and Community in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Northern France.
- Matthew Hannaford (second supervisor) - Consequences of past climate change for state formation and security in Southern Africa.
- Teaching activities
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Undergraduate:
- HST114 - Pagans, Christians and Heretics in Medieval Europe
- HST2011 - The Medieval Inquisition
- HST3302 - Cultural Encounters
Postgraduate:
- HST6031 - The Dawn of Modernity in the Late Middle Ages
- HST6601 - Approaching the Middle Ages
- Professional activities and memberships
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Membership of learned societies:
- Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
- Member of the German History Society
- Member of the Görres-Gesellschaft zur Pflege der Wissenschaft
- Member of the Willibald-Pirckheimer-Gesellschaft zur Erforschung von Renaissance und Humanismus
Board memberships:
- External member of the committee of the Academies of Sciences of Heidelberg and Leipzig on "Klöster im Mittelalter"
- Member of the organisational committee of the international biennial medieval conferences of La Mendola (Italy)
- Member of the advisory board of the Sijal Institute for Arabic Language and Culture at Amman
- Member of the editorial board of German History (2009-2015) and Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte (from inception)
- Member of the editorial board of the Corpus membranarum Capuanarum edition of the Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane
- Member of the editorial board of the "Studi di storia dal medioevo all'età contemporanea. Istituzioni, società, economia e vita religiosa" series
Others:
- Visiting Professor in History at Newman University, Birmingham (2013-2016)
- Invited professor at the University of Constance (January-February 2013)
- Invited professor at the Scuola Superiore of the University of Catania for a series of lectures and seminars on “Contemporary History from the Perspective of a Medievalist” (May-June 2011)
Administrative roles:
- I work on the Europeanisation of the University of Sheffield with the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Keith Burnett.
- I am also a Director of the Centre for the Study of Abrupt, Violent and Traumatic Change with Professors Grant Bigg (Department of Geography) and Sue Vice (School of English)
- Public engagement
- “’My ventures are not in one bottom trusted, nor to one place’. Pre-modern citizens: here, there, and elsewhere”, keynote lecture at the 3rd Swiss Congress of Historical Sciences, Fribourg, Switzerland, 9 February 2013.
- After-lecture talk (in French)
- After-lecture interview (in French)
In the media:
- “Ideengeschichte: Apokalypse gestern – Gespräche”, interview, Radio Bremen, 16 February 2014