Our Students
Learn more about some of the students in our community, what drew them to Global Medieval Studies, and their recommendations for professors and classes within the program!
Kelvin Doe
I wish to express my gratitude for the generous support provided by the GU GMVS travel award, which enabled me to embark on a weeklong journey to Munich and Salzburg. This trip proved to be an enlightening experience, both personally and academically.
During my time in Munich, I had the privilege of visiting the MGH, the largest archive of Medieval Frankish sources. This visit allowed me to engage with primary sources I had previously only encountered digitally. I also had a brief layover in London, where I took photos at tourist spots.
Both Munich and Salzburg are notable for their abundance of castles. In Germany, I explored Nymphenburg Palace, Neuschwanstein Castle, and Hohenschwangau Castle, while in Austria, I marveled at the Hohensalzburg Fortress. There were so many castles in the region that I may have visited others, but it was difficult to keep track.
I explored the English Garden, took a photo at the Staatlicher Tor, wandered around the Olympic Park, and enjoyed many biergartens. Notable highlights included the efficient German U-bahn and S-bahn systems, which made traveling easy.
One of the more impactful aspects of my trip was a visit to Dachau, where I gained a deeper understanding of the historical atrocities that occurred there. I also hiked in the Austrian mountains for a few hours, visited Mozart’s birthplace, and admired the trick fountains in Salzburg.
In summary, I am grateful for the GU GMVS travel award, which transformed my vacation into a meaningful academic and personal experience. These experiences will remain with me, and I look forward to further scholarly pursuits and exploration in the future.
Ian Gould
This summer, I took a road trip to various medieval cliff dwelling sites in southern Utah.
When I first had the idea for this trip, I wanted to see some of the most famous sites of medieval America, like Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Unfortunately, a combination of trip logistics and
park closures made this unworkable, but this only turned my attention to some of the sites further west. I am ultimately grateful for this, as my trip led me to see some of the lesser-known or more off-the-beaten-track cliff dwellings that have contributed to our collective knowledge about medieval American societies.
I began this tour at the Edge of the Cedars museum in Blanding, Utah in order to get more of an informational background with the sites I would be visiting. The museum had an impressive collection of ancestral Puebloan pottery and other artifacts, including a particularly striking sash made out of red macaw feathers. On the museum grounds was an excavated Pueblo village with a large multi-room structure. I later visited a similar-looking site at Mule Canyon.
I visited Hovenweep National Monument, the only site on my trip that is managed by the National Park Service. The circular dwellings were quite well-preserved, but the most striking aspect of this site was the landscape. The structures were dotted around the rim of a canyon, perched right on the edge in a way that, in some cases, looked somewhat precarious.
Hiking the loop through and around the canyon, I was able to see the landscape from many different angles, and by the end, I was struck with the sense of place the whole area gave off. Most archeological sites I’ve had the chance to visit before, including Edge of the Cedars, just kind of seem like something dug out of a hillside. At Hovenweep, however, it was easy to envision the type of community that existed here, with a community of houses ringing this canyon. It’s difficult to put into words, but Hovenweep felt like a true place. The distinctive landscape told more about the shape of the community and how it might have functioned than the stone structures could have ever communicated alone.
My final stop was the House On Fire site near Mule Canyon, so called because the patterns on the rocks above it really do make it look like the structures are on fire. It is easily the most visually striking place I visited. The structures are located well off the road, at the end of a roughly 2-mile hike along a creek through a wooded canyon-like area.
Though the landscape looked quite different than Hovenweep, it communicated a similar sense of place, with the structures wedged into the cliff overlooking the wooded creek, a secluded home in the high desert.
Erik Hoets
William Calderon
Graduate Students
Bryna Cameron-Steinke
Bryna is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Georgetown’s History Department studying early medieval environmental history. Her dissertation research examines land use and land transformation in northwestern France, focusing on coastal Brittany and Normandy, between 300-1000 AD. Bryna is from Toronto, Canada, and before coming to Georgetown, she completed a BA&Sc at McGill University, where she studied Biology and History, and an MA from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. In undergrad, she was interested in the intersection between biology and history, which eventually led her to environmental history. Bryna’s research is profoundly interdisciplinary, using evidence from archaeology and palynology, the study of plant pollen and spores, in addition to traditional written sources. Though her background is in history, she’s sought out training in these other fields. For archaeology, for instance, she’s studied archaeological theory and participated in the excavation of an early medieval infant cemetery, thought to be the result of a malaria epidemic, in Lugnano in Teverina, Italy, in 2019. She’s also planning to train in palynology. Since there are relatively few surviving written sources from the early Middle Ages, Bryna thinks an interdisciplinary approach is particularly valuable for this period. She hopes that her research will help show the potential of interdisciplinary research for medieval history. Otherwise, when she’s not reading pollen diagrams and Latin charters, Bryna loves getting outside and going on hikes, runs, and bike rides around DC.
