Prof Matt Innes

Overview

Biography

I studied History at the University of Cambridge, where I took a double-starred first in 1991 and went on to complete a PhD in 1996. After academic posts at Cambridge (Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse, 1994-7), Birmingham and York, I joined Birkbeck as a Lecturer in History in 1999 (subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer (2002), Reader (2004) and Professor (2006)).

In addition to working as Professor of History, I am currently Vice-Master of Birkbeck: see http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/people/appointments-6-june-2013/2004283.article. A full academic c.v. briefly outlining my current academic and professional activities is available here. Prior to my current role as Vice-Master I have also filled a wide variety of leadership roles within the college including Head of Department and Dean, as well as serving as being elected onto the college’s board of Governors by Academic Board (2005-9). In 2008 I was made Pro-Vice-Master with responsibility for strategy, in which capacity I was responsible for academic development and resource allocation within academic Schools and professional service departments.
Growing up in a West Yorkshire milltown in the 1980s, it was sheer brute luck that gave me the opportunity to benefit from a University education in a way that was impossible for many of my school friends. That experience has meant that I have always believed above all in the transformative power of Higher Education to raise horizons and expand opportunities, and it is no accident that I settled at Birkbeck with its unique mission of providing the highest quality education to working people.

Research

Research overview

Matthew’s research has ranged widely over the history of western Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the eleventh century. He has published on intellectual and political history, particularly of the Carolingian Empire which dominated western Europe in the eighth to tenth centuries; but his particular specialisms are in the history of economic and social transformation, and the cultural history of the ways in which communities utilise the past to make sense of the present. His publications and research cover post-Roman western Europe, and Anglo-Saxon England, as well as the Carolingian and post-Carolingian periods in continental western Europe.

One current theme of my current research is the collapse and then reassertion of social hierarchies in western Europe’s early medieval centuries. The immediately post-Roman period is more or less unique as a period in recorded history, because it saw a decrease in social stratification, with the gap between rich and poor growing smaller, albeit in the context of a general decrease in economic exchange and social specialisation. The Carolingian and post-Carolingian periods, on the other hand, saw social stratification vigorously reassert itself. My research is increasingly interested in identifying the human agencies behind this pattern of development, as well as locating it more broadly in comparative terms a phenomenon distinctive to western European history. This seems to me to open up more three dimensional ways to understand a period normally discussed in more depersonalised and implicitly elite-focused terms of migration, invasion and ethnogenesis, conversion and Christianisation.

A second current research interest is in the methods and philosophy of early medieval history. Much recent work by myself and others has drawn on early medieval legal documents (often known as charters, recording property transfers or court cases) to elucidate social structure. This documentary evidence survives for modern historians only because of historical processes – processes of production, storage and retrieval, archival codification and survival, and finally modern criticism and edition – and these historical processes were themselves shaped by power relationships. Understanding the forces shaping the contours of writable history poses fundamental questions about the methods and philosophy of history, as well as raising the intriguing possibility of studying now ‘lost’ documents whose existence is known through earlier annotations or through reference in surviving texts.

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

1

Matthew has supervised MPhil and PhD supervisions to completion on a wide range of topics in late antique and early medieval history, ranging from the city of Narbonne in late antiquity to the social and political history of the Christian-Muslim frontier in tenth to eleventh century Catalonia. Several former students have published their doctoral work in book and article form, and two hold academic posts at UK Universities.

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• CAROLINE CLARK

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor

  Awarded:

  2018

Publications