Christopher Callow

I have been in my current post since 2005. Before that I held temporary positions at Birmingham, Birkbeck College and UCL. I have held a variety of administrative roles at Birmingham. I am Senior Admissions tutor for the Dept of History. I have been my College's lead for Joint Honours programme and Head of Education for my School, each for three years.

In 2013 I held a Snorri Sturluson Icelandic Fellowship at Stofnun Árna Magnússonar in Iceland.

I have been a member of the Council of the Viking Society for Northern Research (2009-12). I was a founder member of Birmingham’s medieval studies research centre, Centre for the Study of the Middle Ages (CeSMA).

I have been external examiner for postgraduate taught programmes in Nordic Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands (2016-2020), undergraduate programmes for the Dept of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge (2017-2021) and for the Department of Scandinavian Studies at UCL (2024-).

I have been co-organising the Midlands Viking Symposium with colleagues in the School of English at the University of Nottingham since 2005. This public-facing event usually happens on a Saturday in spring in Nottingham or Birmingham.

My central research interest is society of medieval Iceland. Wider issues and aspects of this include approaches to narratives; saga literature, including Sagas of Icelanders and Sturlunga saga. My first book, Landscape, Tradition and Power in Medieval Iceland (Brill, 2020) considered these texts by examining two particular regions of Iceland against the backdrop of institutional and familial structures, and economic patterns. I am currently thinking very hard about the role of place-names in shaping and being shaped by medieval people's ideas about the past. This is informing articles I am writing about 'Celts' and slaves in early Iceland.

I have been invited to contribute articles on the medieval Icelandic church to two books connected to the five-year research project on the major estate of Oddi in Iceland (Oddarannsóknin). One volume presents research for an international scholarly audience, the other (in Icelandic) presents its findings to the public.

My next project is a book on the attitudes of people in Iceland towards slavery from the medieval to the modern period. Icelanders wrote extensively about their own origins and sometimes about slavery in other places. These texts provide a rich view of Icelanders' identities and self-perception.