Robin Fleming
Professor
Biography
Professor Fleming teaches courses on Roman and early medieval history, the Vikings, historical archaeology, and material culture. Earlier in her career she wrote on the political history of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Norman England; historical writing in the early Middle Ages; English law before the Common Law; Domesday Book; and nineteenth-century medievalism. She now investigates Roman and early medieval material culture and animals, and writes history from archaeology. Her most recent book, on Britain in the century before and after Rome’s fall, thinks through the ways Roman ways of life, identity, burial, and status marking changed once the Roman economy collapsed and connections to the wider Roman world began to unravel. She is now finishing a new book on dogs in Roman Britain, an earlier version of which she gave as the 2022 James Ford Lecturer in British history at the University of Oxford. Videos of the six lectures can be found on the Oxford History Department's website . She has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Harvard Society of Fellows; the Bunting Institute; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University; and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Royal Historical Society, and the London Society of Antiquaries. In 2006 she received the first annual Boston College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Faculty Mentoring Award. She is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.