Helen Foxhall FORBES

Helen Foxhall Forbes is professor of medieval history and PI of the research project Science, Society and Environmental Change in the First Millennium CE (SSE1K, ERC Grant Agreement 101044437), a Consolidator Grant funded by the European Research Council (ERC).

She studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge (2001-2008) and Theology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg-im-Breisgau (2007-2008). Subsequently she held posts at the universities of Cambridge (2008-2009), Leicester (2009-2012), Exeter (2012-2013) and Durham (2013-2022).

Her research focuses on Europe and the Mediterranean from late antiquity to the early middle ages. Her particular research interests include environmental history and the links between human beings and their environments, the history of Christianity and of Christian theology, as well as intellectual history and the history of science. 

Her first book, Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: Theology and Society in an Age of Faith (2013), was funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship held at the University of Leicester. This research demonstrated the important connections between theology and its social context in early medieval England.

She is currently completing two books on purgatory in late antiquity and the early middle ages (Fire of Love: purgatory in the late antique imagination, and Fire of Hope: purgatory in early medieval Europe, to be published with Oxford University Press. In addition she is preparing an English translation of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great for Liverpool University Press, in the Translated Texts for Historians series.

She welcomes book proposals for the Brepols series, Knowledge, Scholarship and Science in the Middle Ages, of which she is General Editor.

She is a member of the Bova Marina Archaeological Project and has been involved with excavations in Calabria since 1999.

She is also a member of the international advisory board for the Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research (Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3385-3272