Dr Susannah Bain

My research focuses on the social and political history of Mediterranean cities in the later Middle Ages (particularly Italy). I am particularly interested in exploring socio-political connections and communication in and between the urban centres of the region, and the ways in which politics and the environment intersect. I particularly enjoy using comparative approaches to the study of these topics.

Research interests

My doctoral thesis reconsidered politics in cities across the Italian peninsula and their engagements with the wider Mediterranean region through the lens of political communication. It explored changing approaches to written communication and archival practice in this period using urban history-writing (e.g., chronicles). The late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were a time of acute local and regional political conflict for Italy and the Mediterranean as a whole. I drew comparatively on narrative texts and archival materials from cities across northern Italy and Sicily, demonstrating how urban political elites used multiple media to create meaning around their political relationships. These interpretations shaped local developments as well as those of the wider region.

More recently, I have begun to use the rich records that survive from cities across the Mediterranean region to consider how urban political and social dynamics shaped, and were shaped by, the natural environment.

I have taught tutorials on the central and later Middle Ages (Europe and the World, Britain and Ireland, France) and the Crusades, as well as second- and third-year Disciplines classes on approaches to the study of History.

Before arriving at Oxford for my Masters, I completed my undergraduate degree at UCL (University College London). My doctoral research is kindly supported by the Oxford-David Jones Graduate Scholarship and the Arnold, Bryce, and Read Writing Up Fund. I am an Early Career Member of the Royal Historical Society.