Austin Mason

Education & Professional History

College of William & Mary, A, University of Oxford, MSt; Boston College, PhD

I teach courses in history and digital humanities and work with students, faculty and staff to build a robust Digital Humanities program that fosters both digital scholarship and pedagogy on campus. Prior to coming to Carleton, I taught in the history department at the University of Minnesota, where I have been a Research Affiliate and member of the Digital Premodern Workshop with the Center for Premodern Studies. I am also Treasurer of the Haskins Society, which currently holds its annual conference at the University of Richmond each November.

Organizations & Scholarly Affiliations

American Historical Association
Medieval Academy of America
Haskins Society
Association for Computers and the Humanities
American Institute of Archaeology
European Association of Archaeologists
International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England
EXARC (Experimental Archaeology)

I am an early medieval historian by training, with an interdisciplinary research agenda encompassing religious history, material culture, archaeology and the digital humanities. My current book project, “Listening to the Early Medieval Dead: Religious Practices in England, c.400-900 CE,” comes out of my doctoral dissertation, which I completed at Boston College in 2012. I leverage archaeological evidence (like bones, brooches, and buckets) and cutting-edge GIS mapping techniques to rewrite the history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion as a complex story of locally-negotiated, lived religious practices.

BOOKS
Listening to the Early Medieval Dead: Religious Practices in Eastern Britain, 400–900CE (manuscript in preparation)

ARTICLES
Jake Morton and Austin Mason, “Launching an Experimental Archaeology Course at the Undergraduate Level,” EXARC Journal, EXARC Journal Issue 2022/4 (2022).

Susannah Ottaway and Austin Mason, “Reconsidering Poor Law Institutions by Virtually Reconstructing and Re-Viewing an Eighteenth-Century Workhouse,” The Historical Journal, 64.3 (2021), 557–82.

Austin Mason and Tom Williamson, “Ritual Landscapes in Pagan and Early Christian England,” Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts, 6 (2017).

“The Early English Cult of Saints in Long-term Perspective,” in The Long Seventh Century: Continuity and Discontinuity in an Age of Transition, ed. Emanuele E. Intagliata, Thomas J. MacMaster, and Bethan N. Morris (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), 39–59.

“Buried Buckets: Rethinking Ritual Behavior Before England’s Conversion,” in Austin Mason, Alecia Arceo, and Robin Fleming, “Buckets, Monasteries, and Crannógs: Material Culture and the Rewriting of Early Medieval British History,” Haskins Society Journal 20 (2008), 1–38 at 3–18.

DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS
Commentary on Bede’s Historia Ecclesiatica, with Rob Hardy and William North, Dickinson College Commentaries, ed. Christopher Francese (under contract).

REVIEWS
Review of Environment, Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England: Time and Topography, by Tom Williamson, The Medieval Review (October 2014).
Review of Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400-650, by Thomas Green, Speculum 88, no.4 (October 2013).
Review of The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology. ed. Helena Hamerow, David A. Hinton, and Sally Crawford, The Antiquaries Journal 93 (September 2013).
Review of Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course, by Roberta Gilchrist, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44, no.2 (Autumn 2013).