I work on art and archaeology from late Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on the early medieval period. I hold degrees in archaeology and art history from the Universities of Bonn, Freiburg, and York. Currently, I am a postdoc in the Department of Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology at the University of Vienna. For detailed information, please see my CV.

RESEARCH

In the academic year 2023-2024, I will be a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where I will continue working on my current project, tentatively entitled “Medieval Material Culture and the Senses.” It investigates the field of sensory experience and material culture in medieval archaeology from the early Middle Ages to the early Renaissance and explores multi-sensory concepts and material culture as tangible and physical objects embedded in a social environment.

My new book Image and Ornament in the Early Medieval West with Cambridge University Press explores post-Roman art produced in central and north-western Europe. Often treated as representative of the pagan identities of the new ‘Germanic’ rulers of the early medieval world, this book offers a critical reevaluation of the ethnic and religious categories of art that still inform our understanding of early medieval art and archaeology. Instead, it emphasises aesthetic variety, a cross-cultural concept that bridged the various identities of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean worlds.

Published with De Gruyter, Archäologische Chronologie und historische Interpretation (2016) explores material culture and historical narratives in late antique and early medieval southern Germany, especially in terms of archaeological dating methods. The correspondence analysis of c. 650 Merovingian-period graves led to a new chronological model for early medieval southern Germany from the early fifth to the mid-eighth century. In 2018, the book was awarded the Barbara Scholkmann Förderpreis für Historische Archäologie from the University of Tübingen. The relevant data and CA plots are available at

I have also edited, together with James Harland, the recent volume Interrogating the ‘Germanic’ (2021) that brings together contributions from across the disciplines on the term ‘Germanic’, which is frequently used as a category for a range of forms of cultural and literary material.

TEACHING

At the Universities of Vienna and Freiburg, I have thought broad survey courses in the archaeology from the Roman Period to the later Middle Ages, as well as lectures and classes on archaeology and visual culture and medieval urbanism in Eurasia and (see here for more details).