History Department Faculty
Robin Fleming
Professor
Robin Fleming
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S325
Telephone: 617-552-8484
Email: robin.fleming.1@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., University of California
- Ph.D., University of California
Research Interests
Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England; material culture
Department
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.
Publications
Books:
The Material Fall of Roman Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise of the Middle Ages, c. 400–c. 1050, New Penguin History of Britain, vol. 2 (Penguin: UK edition, 2010; US and paperback editions, 2011; Chinese translation, 2017).
Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England (Cambridge University Press: 1998; paperback edition 2004).
Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge University Press: 1991; reprint 1995; paperback edition 2004; Chinese translation, 2008).
Special Edition of a Journal
Co-edited a special edition (with Katherine L. French) of the journal Fragments, 5–7 entitled A Thing of the Past: Material Evidence and the Writing of Medieval England’s Past(2016–18).
Recent Articles & Book Chapters:
with Katherine L. French, “Objecthood,” in Sarah Semple and Julie Lund, eds., A Cultural History of Objects (London, in press).
“The Movement of People and Things between Britain and France in the Late- and Post-Roman Periods,” in Bonnie Effros and Isabel Moreira, eds., Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World (Oxford, in press).
“Old Buildings, Building Material, and the Death of Recycling in Post-Roman Britain,” in Chloe Duckworth and Andrew Wilson, eds., Ancient Recycling (Oxford, in press).
“Four Communities of Pot and Glass Recyclers in Early Post Roman Britain,” in Transformations of Romanness, ed. Walter Pohl (Vienna, 2018), 403–18.
The Ritual Recycling of Roman Building Material in Late Fourth- and Early Fifth-Century Britain,” European Journal of Post-Classical Archaeologies, 6 (2016), 7–31.
co-authored with Keith Fitzpatrick Matthews, “The Perils of Periodization: Roman Ceramics after 400,” in a special edition of Fragments: A Thing of the Past: Material Evidence and the Writing of Medieval England’s Material Past: Robin Fleming and Katherine French, eds., Fragments, 5 (2016), 1–33.
“Struggling to be Roman in a Former Roman Province,” Being Roman on the Periphery: Identities in the Provinces, ed. Lisa Brody and Gail Hoffman (Chicago, 2014), 211–28.
Recycling in Britain after the Fall of Rome’s Metal Economy,” Past and Present, 217 (2012), 3–45.
"Elites, Boats and Foreigners: Rethinking the Rebirth of English Towns,” in Città e campagna prima del mille, Atti delle Settimane di Studio, 56 (2009), 393-425.
“Writing Biography on the Edge of History,” American Historical Review, 114 (2009), 606-14.
"Acquiring, Displaying, and Destroying Silk in Late Anglo-Saxon England," Early Medieval Europe, 15 (2007), 127-58.
“Bones for Historians: Putting the Body Back in Biography,” in Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates (Woodbridge, 2006), 29-48.
“MacDomesday Book” (co-authored with Andrew Lowerre), Past and Present, 184 (2004), 209-32.
“Lords and Labour,” in The Short Oxford History of the British Isles, vol. 3: Britain and Ireland in the Ninth through Eleventh Centuries, ed. Wendy Davies (Oxford, 2003), 107-38.