PEOPLE
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS
Corresponding PI | Institute for Medieval Research – Austrian Academy of Sciences | Emeritus Professor of Medieval History – University of Vienna.
He has also taught at Los Angeles (UCLA), Leiden, Budapest (CEU) and Ishevsk (Russia). He is fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize (2004) and the ERC Advanced Grant (2010). His fields of study cover the role of ethnicity and identity in late antiquity and the early middle ages, the transformation of the Roman world and the development of the post-Roman kingdoms, the history of the Eurasian steppe peoples, early medieval historiography and its manuscript transmission, early medieval lawcodes, and Italian cultural and political history until c. 1000 AD.
Johannes Krause received his Ph.D. in Genetics at the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, supervised by Svante Pääbo. Subsequently, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as a postdoc before he was appointed Junior-Professor for Paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen in 2010 and subsequently Full-Professor for Archaeo- and Paleogenetics at the same university in 2013. In 2014, he became one of the two founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, where he was the head of the Department of Archaeogenetics. In 2020, he moved back to the MPI Leipzig. He is one of the founding directors of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean (MHAAM), established in 2017. His research focuses on the analysis of ancient DNA to investigate such topics as pathogens from historic and prehistoric epidemics, human genetic history and human evolution. He has also contributed to deciphering Neanderthal genetics and the shared genetic heritage of Neanderthals and modern humans.
Director of the Archaeological Institute at ELTE University of Budapest
Tivadar Vida is an internationally renowned specialist on early medieval archaeology in the Carpathian Basin. He received his PhD and his Habilitation from the Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where he is Head of the Department of Early Medieval and Historical Archaeology. He has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Bolyai János Scholarship for Research, and the University of Saint Petersburg, Russia, and has served as visiting Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian Universität, Munich and Guest Lecturer at the Philipps Universität, Marburg, Germany.
Emeritus Professor of Medieval History, Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton, USA.
Patrick Geary is an internationally recognized scholar of the Early Middle Ages and has published extensively on late Roman and post-Roman societies, ethnicity, social structures, and migration. His books on early medieval history have been translated into more than a dozen languages and he lectures regularly in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. For the past ten years, he has led an interdisciplinary team that has pioneered best practice methods for combining genomic, historical, and archaeological approaches to understanding migration period societies. The recent Nature Communications publication of their pilot project on Longobard-era societies in Hungary and Italy has been recognized as a model for such collaborations (Amorim et al. 2018).