Bonnie Effros
Office: 200 Walker Hall
Phone: (352) 392-0796
Fax: (352) 392-5378
beffros@ufl.edu
Mailing address:
Department of History
University of Florida
P.O. Box 117320
Gainesville, FL 32611-7320
Bonnie Effros is professor of history and Rothman Chair and Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. She earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in 1994.
Professor Effros has focused on interpreting burial ritual in early medieval communities. Her first two books, Caring for Body and Soul: Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World (Penn State University Press 2002) and Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages (University of California Press 2003) examined written and archaeological evidence related to the treatment and burial of the dead in post-Roman Gaul. Her interest in material remains, particularly important due to the scarcity of documents attesting to early medieval ritual practices, also contributed to her next book, Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul (Palgrave 2002) in which she explored early medieval feasting and fasting rituals. This study allowed her to explore the lifeways of marginalized groups, particularly women, who were able to express themselves more fully in this informal context than in the political sphere in which they were poorly represented. Her work is closely tied to current debates assessing the nature of Christian conversion, ethnic and gender identity, and the survival of Roman mores in the West following Germanic migrations during the fourth and fifth centuries.
Most recently, Professor Effros has been working actively on a history of medieval antiquarianism and archaeology in nineteenth-century France. In a book tentatively titled Uncovering the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830-1914, she links growing interest in the Merovingian past to the discovery of long-forgotten cemeteries uncovered during the course of the industrial revolution in France. These discoveries of “Germanic warriors” caused the French to reconsider their national origins which could no longer be linked exclusively to the ancient Gauls. In this work, she also examines the impact of the formation of the discipline of archaeology on the collection and interpretation of material artifacts. Some of her exploration of these themes has already been published in Early Medieval Europe, Journal of the History of Collections, the supplementary series of the Reallexikon für Altertumskunde, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters (published by the Austrian Academy) and a variety of other edited collections.
Professor Effros previously taught at the University of Alberta, where she held an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of History and Classics, at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and at Binghamton University, where she served as chair of the Department of History. Among other awards, she has received a Sylvan C. Coleman and Pamela Coleman Memorial Fund Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Berkshire Summer Fellowship at the Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), a Camargo Foundation Fellowship in Cassis, France, the Franklin Research Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society, as well as grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Munich and the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna. For the past several years she has served as a sponsored lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America. She is also series editor of the Brill Series on the Early Middle Ages, a continuation of the Transformation of the Roman World series published by E.J. Brill in the Netherlands, and serves on the Breasted Prize Committee for the American Historical Association.
In supervising graduate students, Professor Effros is interested in exploring topics in late antique and early medieval history of Western Europe, particularly those that examine Christianity, gender, or some theme related to archaeological evidence. She is also eager to work with students on the history of archaeology and museums. Since work in the medieval field requires proficiency in Latin and at least two modern languages, and research on nineteenth-century archaeology and museums mandates proficiency in at least two modern languages, students should begin this preparation as early as possible in their studies. She will be teaching a graduate seminar on gender and spirituality in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in spring 2010.
