Ms Teresa Barucci

I am a historian of late medieval Europe, primarily interested in the social and political history of human mobility. I joined Magdalen as a Fellow by Examination in Medieval History in January 2024. Before that, I was Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome, completed a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, and obtained an MSt from the University of Oxford and a BA from Durham University.

Research Interests

My PhD thesis considered the relation between academic mobility and identity construction at the universities of Paris and Orléans. Because of their prestigious reputation, Paris and Orléans were preferred destinations for academic mobility in medieval Europe, and students from cities as dispersed as Lisbon, Turku, and Constantinople converged there and lived side by side. The students held different political loyalties, spoke different languages, and had different cultural backgrounds. This allowed me to apply an original comparative and trans-regional approach to the debates around the development of secular and socio-political forms of collective identity (often termed ‘national’) in medieval Europe.

My main current project is a history of freedom of movement and mobility control in fifteenth-century Italy. A constant flow of people – students, but also merchants, ambassadors, soldiers, pilgrims, workers of different kinds, vagrants, and so forth – moved up and down the Italian peninsula, travelling to and from their respective destinations. How was such movement regulated and controlled by the authorities?

At the same time, I am working on a number of smaller projects on emigration, extraterritorial representation, and popular political culture in late medieval Europe and the Mediterranean region.
I am very interested in comparative (in space and time) and trans-regional approaches to the pre-modern world, as well as in the link between pre-modern history and the modern social and political sciences.

You can follow me on X: @teresa_barucci