Mateusz Fafinski

Academic Interests

Commons Groups

HC

Recent Commons Activity

joined the group Medieval Studies
joined the group Old English / Early Medieval …
changed their profile picture

About

I am a historian of Late Antique and Early Medieval West with a particular interest in the use of Roman legacy as a governance resource.

In the past I have worked on travel and trade in Early Medieval Northern Sea basin, as well as literary reception of classical archetypes in British literature.

Now my main project investigates the use of Roman assets (especially infrastructural ones) as governance resources in Late Antique and early medieval Britain; the social impact as well as the role that the Roman infrastructure played in the Early Medieval economy and politics of the island make it a important but also rarely problematized topic.

I also work extensively in the area of Digital Humanities, exploring spatial presentation of written sources.

Publications

Books

Abbott, Jean, Elaine Treharne, and Mateusz Fafinski, eds. Beowulf by All: Community Translation and Workbook. Foundations. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021.

Fafinski, Mateusz, and Jakob Riemenschneider, eds. The Past Through Narratology. New Approaches to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven Mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte 18. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2022.

Fafinski, Mateusz. Roman Infrastructure in Early Medieval Britain: The Adaptations of the Past in Text and Stone. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1017/9789048551972.

Articles

Fafinski, Mateusz. ‘Facsimile Narratives: Researching the Past in the Age of Digital Reproduction’. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37, no. 1 (1 April 2022): 94–108. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab017.
———. ‘Faraway, So Close: Liminal Thinking and the Use of Geography in Old English Orosius’. Studia Warmińskie 56 (31 December 2019): 423–37. https://doi.org/10.31648/sw.3252.
———. ‘“Glocal” Matters: The Gospels of St Augustine as a Codex in Translation’. In Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, edited by Benjamin Albritton, Georgia Henley, and Elaine Treharne. London: Routledge, 2020.
———. ‘The Moving Centre: Trade and Travel in York from Roman to Anglo-Saxon Times’. In The Anglo-Saxons: The World through Their Eyes, BAR British Series, edited by Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider, 71–77, 2014.
Fafinski, Mateusz, and Michael Piotrowski. ‘Challenges for Visualising Spatial and Chronological Distribution of Medieval Manuscripts: Towards a Fuzzy Ontology”’. In Data for History 2020: Modelling Time, Places, Agents. Data for History – Annual Conference 2020, edited by Torsten Hiltmann and Francesco Beretta. Berlin, 2020.
———. ‘Modelling Medieval Vagueness. Towards a Methodology of Visualising Geographical Uncertainty in Historical Texts’. In INFORMATIK 2020: 50. Jahrestagung Der Gesellschaft Für Informatik; 3. Workshop InfDH 2020 “Methoden Und Anwendungen Der Computational Humanities”. Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), edited by Ralf H. Reussner, Anne Koziolek, and Robert Heinrich, 1317–26. Bonn: Gesellschaft für Informatik, 2020.
Fafinski, Mateusz, and Jakob Riemenschneider, eds. ‘Introduction’. In The Past Through Narratology. New Approaches to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 1–4. Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven Mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte 18. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2022.
———, eds. ‘Literarised Spaces Towards a Narratological Framework for Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages’. In The Past Through Narratology. New Approaches to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 7–23. Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven Mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte 18. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2022.
Piotrowski, Michael, and Mateusz Fafinski. ‘Nothing New under the Sun? Computational Humanities and the Methodology of History”’. CHR2020: Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Humanities Research (Amsterdam, Nov. 18–20, 2020). CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2020, 171–81.

Public scholarship

Fafinski, Mateusz. ‘Boris Johnson’s Roman Fantasies’. Foreign Policy. Accessed 29 April 2022. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/01/boris-johnson-fall-rome-immigration/.
———. ‘Die Macht der Karten’. Übermedien, 11 March 2022. https://uebermedien.de/69336/die-macht-der-karten/.
———. ‘In Putin’s War, the Map Is Not the Territory’. Foreign Policy. Accessed 29 April 2022. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/07/russia-war-ukraine-maps/.
———. ‘On the Road Again – Das Nachleben der römischen Infrastruktur’. Antike Welt 6 (2017): 49–57.
———. ‘The Past Doesn’t Tell Easy Stories About the West’. Foreign Policy. Accessed 29 April 2022. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/20/history-cliodynamics-weird-turchin/.
Kiel, Viola. ‘Ukrainekrieg: »Man kann mit Karten hervorragend lügen« – Interview mit dem Historiker Mateusz Fafinski’. Der Spiegel, 15 April 2022, sec. Wissenschaft. https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/ukraine-krieg-historiker-mateusz-fafinski-man-kann-mit-karten-hervorragend-luegen-a-05230677-77b9-4354-89aa-65de98fa88e5.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Freie Universität Berlin / Stanford University