Florin Curta
Office: 202 Keene-Flint Hall
Phone: (352) 273-3367
Fax: (352) 392-6927
fcurta@ufl.edu
www.clas.ufl.edu/users/fcurta/
Mailing address:
Department of History
University of Florida
P.O. Box 117320
Gainesville, FL 32611-7320
Research interests: Carolingian Europe, medieval Eastern Europe, Byzantium, archaeology, medievalism
Florin Curta researches the written and archaeological evidence of medieval history on the European continent. His recent studies dealt with such diverse topics as power representation in early medieval Bulgaria; the archaeology of service settlements in the early Middle Ages; the earliest Avar-age stirrups; the history of medieval archaeology; hilltop settlements in the early Byzantine Balkans; the archaeology of identity in Old Russia; the Amber Trail in early medieval Europe; and the history of Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages. Ethnicity is a major theme of his research, as shown in his first book entitled The Making of the Slavs. History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, A.D. 500-700, which was named a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the Herbert Baxter Adams Award of the American Historical Association in 2003. The book was translated into Romanian and Bulgarian. Curta's second book, Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1250, addresses important themes such as the rise of medieval states, the conversion to Christianity, the monastic movement inspired by developments in Western Europe, and in Byzantium, and the role of material culture (architecture, the arts, and objects of daily life) in the representation of power. A third book, An Economic and Social History of Greece, c. 500 to c. 1050, further explores the relation between the establishment of trans-Mediterranean trade routes and the rise of a landed aristocracy in early medieval Greece.
Curta has edited four collections of studies: Neglected Barbarians (2009); The Other Europe in the Middle Ages. Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Cumans (2007); Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis. Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (2005); and East Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages (2005). The latter volume was named a 2006 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He has also published extensively in such journals as Speculum, Early Medieval Europe, Hesperia, Viator, Haskins Society Journal, Ancient West & East, and Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. He is the editor-in-chief of the Brill series East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, as well as a member of the Medieval Academy of America Publication Advisory Board and the Advisory Board of the Cursor Mundi series of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Professor Curta is the recent recipient of a NEH fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens; a senior fellowship in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks; membership in the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, in Princeton; and an American Council of Learned Societies postdoctoral fellowship in East European Studies.
