Dr Chris Callow BA, PhD (Birmingham)

I have been in my current post since 2005. Before that I held temporary positions at Birmingham, Birkbeck College and UCL. I have held a variety of administrative roles at Birmingham. I am Senior Admissions tutor for the Dept of History. I have been my College's lead for Joint Honours programme and Head of Education for my School, each for three years.

In 2013 I held a Snorri Sturluson Icelandic Fellowship at Stofnun Árna Magnússonar in Iceland.

I have been a member of the Council of the Viking Society for Northern Research (2009-12). I was a founder member of Birmingham’s medieval studies research centre, Centre for the Study of the Middle Ages (CeSMA).

I have been external examiner for postgraduate taught programmes in Nordic Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands (2016-2020), undergraduate programmes for the Dept of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge (2017-2021) and for the Department of Scandinavian Studies at UCL (2024-).

I have been co-organising the Midlands Viking Symposium with colleagues in the School of English at the University of Nottingham since 2005. This public-facing event usually happens on a Saturday in spring in Nottingham or Birmingham.

Undergraduate

First year

• Discovering the Middle Ages
• Living in the Middle Ages
• Practising History (e.g. usually on medieval outlawry, including Robin Hood)
• Old Norse (as part of the MA in Medieval Studies)

Second year

• Option: Society in the Viking World
• Group Research: Sex and the City: Women’s lives in Heian Japan
• Research Methods (medieval topics)
• Public History

Third year

• Game without Thrones (Special Subject on medieval Iceland)

Postgraduate

• Approaches to Medieval Studies

I would welcome research students on a wide range of issues in the history and archaeology of early medieval western Europe, especially the Vikings and medieval Iceland and Scandinavia. Research proposals on social, cultural or economic history within particular medieval regions or communities would also be possible. I have published on the writing of history in the middle ages and would be interested in supervising similar topics on medieval narratives.

Current doctoral research students and their topics:
- Julie Kilbey, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (co-supervised with Dr Kate Sykes)
- Agni Papamichael, Icelandic perceptions of Byzantium (co-supervised with Prof Judith Jesch)

Past PhD students and subjects:
- Harriet Clarke, Kingship in medieval Norway (co-supervised with Prof Judith Jesch)
- Emma Thompson, Gender and burial practice in Viking Age Scandinavia (MRes, co-supervised with Paul Garwood)
- David Marsh, The Trade in Roman Glass (co-supervised with Dr Roger White)
- Steve Walker, Early medieval Cumbria (co-supervised with Dr John Baker)
- Bernadette McCooey, Pre-industrial farming practices in Iceland
- Ryder Patzuk-Russell, Education in medieval Iceland
- Emma Southon, The early medieval family

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My central research interest is society of medieval Iceland. Wider issues and aspects of this include approaches to narratives; saga literature, including Sagas of Icelanders and Sturlunga saga. My first book, Landscape, Tradition and Power in Medieval Iceland (Brill, 2020) considered these texts by examining two particular regions of Iceland against the backdrop of institutional and familial structures, and economic patterns. I am currently thinking very hard about the role of place-names in shaping and being shaped by medieval people's ideas about the past. This is informing articles I am writing about 'Celts' and slaves in early Iceland.

I have been invited to contribute articles on the medieval Icelandic church to two books connected to the five-year research project on the major estate of Oddi in Iceland (Oddarannsóknin). One volume presents research for an international scholarly audience, the other (in Icelandic) presents its findings to the public.

My next project is a book on the attitudes of people in Iceland towards slavery from the medieval to the modern period. Icelanders wrote extensively about their own origins and sometimes about slavery in other places. These texts provide a rich view of Icelanders' identities and self-perception.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I serve on the advisory board for the journal Nottingham Medieval Studies. For several years, until 2020, I was an AHRC Peer Review College member and have served as an anonymous reviewer for various other national research councils. 

I have worked on a number of initiatives that have communicated academic research to the public or connected outside organisations with the academic community including:

• acting as co-organiser of the Midlands Viking Symposium since its inception. This is an annual spring conference run jointly with Leicester and Nottingham universities presenting the latest academic research to the public.
• serving as a member of the Friends of Birmingham Archives and Heritage (FOBAH) committee for a number of years from its inception.
• working as part of the Rescue!History network including organising two public conferences on man-made climate change. ‘An End to History?’ was a public conference which acted as a forum for academics and activists met to discuss action on man-made climate change in 2008. In contributed an article to the resulting edited volume, History at the End of the World? (2010). In 2014 we held a second conference at the Birmingham and Midland Institute, ‘History and Climate change: What have we learnt?’