Shami Ghosh

Shami Ghosh studied at King’s College London, Harvard University, and the University of Toronto, where he received his PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies in 2009. Formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leicester and Junior Research Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, Shami came to PIMS in 2014 as a Mellon Fellow, and has returned in 2015 as Research Fellow with an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for 2015-17. His research interests range from early medieval historiography to global economic history in the eighteenth century.

Shami’s second monograph, Writing the barbarian past: studies in early medieval historical narrative, has just been published by Brill; other recent publications include “Conquest, conversion and heathen customs in Henry of Livonia’s Chronicon Livoniae and the Livländische Reimchronik,” Crusades 11 (2012); “The imperial abbey of Ellwangen and its peasants: a study of the polyptych of 1337,” Agricultural History Review 62 (2014); “Rural economies and transitions to capitalism: Germany and England compared (c.1200–c.1800),” Journal of Agrarian Change (2015); and “How should we approach the economy of ‘early modern India’,” Modern Asian Studies 49 (2015). Shami has also published a number of articles on medieval German literature; over 30 reviews and review essays on medieval and early modern history, and literature in the Germanic vernaculars; and a book on Icelandic and Norwegian historiograpy: Kings’ sagas and Norwegian history: problems and perspectives (Leiden, 2011).

During his time at the Institute, Shami will (once again) mainly be working on trying to land that elusive tenure-track job (or failing that, another grant; or failing that, another career); but he is also hoping to find some time for actual research so that he can finish his LMS thesis on the fourteenth-century account books of Scheyern Abbey in Bavaria, and make a start on his new project: “Rural commercialisation in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Bavaria.”

  • 2014–2015 - Mellon Fellows
  • 2015–2016 - Research Fellows
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