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Shane Bobrycki is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. His research and teaching center on late antique and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, with a focus on the late antique and early medieval period (c. 300–1100). His book The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2024) argues for the importance of collective behavior in post-Roman Europe, c. 500­–1000. In the wake of urban and demographic decline, crowds became scarcer and smaller in Europe than in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. But collective behavior remained central, in new ways, to political, religious, and economic life. His next major research project considers the evidence, causes, and impact of early medieval demographic change, especially for medieval peasants. 

Bobrycki has published on the Mediterranean slave trade, manuscript culture, comparative Umayyad, English, and Carolingian panegyric, the transmission of medical words from Egypt to Italy, the slantwise resistance and gendering of ninth-century crowds, non-elite passive resistance via food culture, early modern intellectual life, plague puns, and petty merchants. His research has been supported by the American Academy in Rome and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He earned a BA in History from Williams College, an MPhil in Medieval History from Cambridge University, and a PhD in History from Harvard University (2016). Before coming to Iowa, he was a postdoc and lecturer at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard and MIT (2016–2018) and assistant professor at the University of Vienna (2019–2024).

Publications

Books

• The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2024)

Articles and Chapters

• “The Carolingian cocio: On the Vocabulary of the Early Medieval Petty Merchant,” Early Medieval Europe 32.1 (2024): 57–81.
• Review of Booker, Courtney M., Hans Hummer, and Dana M. Polanichka, eds. Visions of Medieval History in North America and Europe: Studies on Cultural Identity and Power (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), in The Medieval Review (2024).
• “A Latin Pun from the First Plague Pandemic,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 58 (2023): 4–11.
• “Montfaucon’s Byzantium,” in The Invention of Byzantine Studies in Early Modern Europe, eds. Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Publications, Harvard University Press, 2021), 279–303. 
• Review of Veronika Unger, Päpstliche Schriftlichkeit im 9. Jahrhundert: Archiv, Register, Kanzlei, Forschungen zur Kaiser- und Papstgeschichte des Mittelalters, Beihefte zu J. F. Böhmer, Regesta Imperii 45. (Böhlau: Wien–Köln–Weimar, 2018), in Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 129/2 (2021): 435–438.
• “Trapa frangetur: The Cookware of Resistance in Twelfth-Century France,” Viator 50.2 (2019): 41–77. 
• “The Flailing Women of Dijon: Crowds in Ninth-Century Europe,” Past and Present 240 (2018): 3–46. 
• “An Early Medieval Epistolary libellus and the Question of Originality: Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS. 717,” Scriptorium 71 (2017): 153–173.
• “Translation, Repurposing, and Misunderstanding from Egypt to Rome to Ravenna: φορεῖον - phorium – furibum,” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 74 (2016): 37–54. 
• “A Hypothetical Slave in Constantinople: Amalarius’s Liber Officialis and the Mediterranean Slave Trade,” Haskins Society Journal 26 (2014): 47–67. 
• “Breaking and Making Tradition: Æthelstan, ‘Abd al-Rahman III, and their Panegyrists,” in Every Inch a King: Comparative Studies in Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, eds. Lynette Mitchell and Charles Melville, Rulers and Elites 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 245–267. 
• “Nigellus, Ausulus: Self-Promotion, Self-Suppression and Carolingian Ideology in the Poetry of Ermold,” in Ego Trouble: Authors and Their Identities in the Early Middle Ages, eds. R. Corradini, M. Gillis, R. McKitterick, I. van Renswoude, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 15 (Vienna: Verlag der ÖAW, 2010), 161–173. 
• “The Royal Consecration ordines of the Pontifical of Sens from a New Perspective,” Bulletin du Centre d’études médiévales d’Auxerre (BUCEMA) 13 (2009): 131–142.