Dr Kate Franklin

Overview

Biography

I am an archaeologist of medieval Armenia and the Caucasus and an indiscriminate enthusiast of speculative fiction, cuisine, and vintage textiles. I have been working on collaborative projects in the Republic of Armenia for a decade, exploring the ways that local politics and Silk Road culture were tangled together in landscape and space-time. I was trained as an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, and I am curious about the experiences of medieval travel, intimacies of medieval embodiment, and the profound and mundane practices of medieval and early modern hospitality. I am field co-director of a project that combines thinking about routes and infrastructure, contemplating ‘domestic’ space, and appreciating the canyon landscapes of Vayots Dzor, Armenia. I received an MPhil degree specializing in Cultural Heritage and Museums from Cambridge, and for three years I put that to work on a cultural heritage management project focused on the archaeology of Afghanistan, directing both GIS data-collection strategy and original research into the pasts of Afghanistan and Central Asia. For two years I lectured in Anthropology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, looking at imagined worlds in recipes, table-settings, archaeological assemblages and science-fictions. My work at the moment is concerned with world-making as a locus of politics, with material culture as a mediator of spatio-temporal distances, and with the interpenetration of literary and ‘real’ landscapes in archaeological work.

Qualifications

• FHEA, 2020

Administrative responsibilities

• Director, MA Program in Medieval History

Research

Research overview

My research interests fluctuate, but a representative list includes:
-Late medieval material culture, architecture, history, and travel accounts, focusing on East-West encounters and the greater Near East
-Cosmopolitanism and the everyday: “world building,” material cosmology/cartography, landscape
-The co-construction of subjects and spaces, the history of naturecultures and feminist approaches to space and landscape
-Materiality, assemblage/assembling, critical posthumanisms
-Food and place-making, cuisine and imagined community
-Heritage politics and ethics, specifically connected to the Silk Road and cultural routes
-The archaeological heritage landscape of Central Asia
-Retrofuturism, nostalgia as political discourse, steampunk and dys/utopian science fiction, and speculative fiction/fabulation as a method and metaphor for writing histories in/of the Anthropocene. 

Research Centres and Institutes

• Steering committee member, Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

Research clusters and groups

• Mobility, migration and globality
• Material Cultures
• Mind and Body
• Environment: Urban, Rural, Global

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

I am happy and excited to supervise research topics in the material culture and history of the Global Medieval, as well as broader chronological periods in the Near East and Central Asia. I love thinking about trade and commerce, travel and displacement, memory, nostalgia, and spatial categories like monumental/domestic and everyday/ritual. Come talk to me about matter, space and time, about architecture, bodies, mobility and the work of writing history/archaeology

Teaching

Teaching

I am the MA Course Director for Medieval History for the 2019-2020 academic year. I am committed to centering on the global and interdisciplinary, interrogating the Middle Ages as a place in text, landscape, architecture, sense, and memory.

Modules I have convened or taught on:

The Medieval World: from Constantine to the Khans (BA Level 4)

Space, Architecture and Landscapes of the Middle Ages (BA Level 5)
Archaeology of the Everyday (BA Level 5)
Blood and Faith: Violence, Religion and Heresy in Medieval and early modern Europe (BA level 6)

Mastering Historical Research: Birkbeck Approaches (MA)

The Silk Road: Imagining Global Cultures from the Middle Ages to UNESCO and the BRI(MA)
Imagined Landscapes of the Middle Ages (MA)

Teaching modules

• Mastering Historical Research: Birkbeck Approaches (SSHC247S7)
• Research Skills for Historians (SSHC386Z7)
• The Medieval World: From Constantine to the Khans (SSHC409S4)
• Space, Architecture and Landscapes of the Middle Ages (SSHC467S5)
• The Silk Road: Imagining Global Cultures from the Middle Ages to UNESCO and BRI (SSHC477S7)

Publications