Christopher Callow

I have been in my current post since 2005. Before that I held temporary positions at Birmingham, Birkbeck College and UCL. My major administrative role at the moment is as the academic lead for Joint Honours programmes across the College of Arts and Law, a role I enjoy, having taken an interdisciplinary BA degree at Birmingham myself.

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).

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.

My next project is a reassessment of the nature of the viking phenomenon which arises from my wider interest in using interdisciplinary approaches to the past using texts, archaeology and place-names. I am writing a monograph that seeks to assess separately the nature of the movement overseas by Scandinavians in the ninth and tenth centuries and the way it was perceived in later centuries. My contention is that, still, we allow later textual evidence to govern our perceptions of the Viking Age.