Austin Mason

Education & Professional History

College of William and Mary, BA; University of Oxford, MA; Boston College, PhD

I earned my PhD in History from Boston College with an emphasis on religious history, material culture, archaeology, spatial and digital humanities and an M.St. in Medieval British History from Oxford University. Currently, I am a Senior Lecturer in History and founding Director of the Digital Arts & Humanities minor program at Carleton College. Here, I teach courses in history, experimental archaeology, and digital arts & humanities, and I 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 Miami each November.

Highlights & Recent Activity

For the past several years, I was co-PI of an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to develop the Virtual Viking Longship Project: A Study in the Future of Liberal Arts Teaching and Research. Recent publications include a chapter called ‘How to Build a Cremation Pyre: Insights from Experimental Archaeology’ in an edited volume on Cremation in the Early Middle Ages, a co-authored article on ‘Balancing Education and Engagement: A Suggested Co-design Process for Historical Game Development,’ and a forthcoming article on ‘Reimagining the “Viking legacy” in Virtual Reality: Race and Representation in America’s “Viking past”.’

Organizations & Scholarly Affiliations

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

“Reimagining the Viking Legacy in Virtual Reality: Race and Representation in America’s Viking Past,” with David Neville and Tim Arner, in Th. Lemm. S. Kalmring, F. Lichtenstein, V. Hilberg (eds.), Vikings! Vikings? New Insights and Reflections on the Use and Misuse of the Terms ‘Viking’ and ‘Viking Age’ in Research, Education, and Society (Schriften des Museums für Archäologie Schloss Gottorf Ergänzungsreihe 17, forthcoming 2026).

“How to Build a Cremation Pyre: Insights from Experimental Archaeology,” in Cremation in the Early Middle Ages. Death, Fire and Identity in North-West Europe, ed. Howard Williams and Femke Lippok (Sidestone Press, 2024), 291–301, doi:10.59641/e3h9b0c1d2.

“Balancing Education and Engagement: A Suggested Co-design Process for Historical Game Development”, with Franziska Funken, Emmanuel Guardiola, Marie-Paule Jungblut, and Johnannes Pause, DH Benelux Journal, 6: Crossing Borders: Digital Humanities Research Across Languages and Modalities (Fall 2024). doi:10.5281/zenodo.14169050.

“Reinventing DH Student Research at Liberal Arts Colleges with Spatial Computing: The Virtual Viking Longship Project,” with David Neville, Timothy Arner, Lily Haas, Maddie Smith, Kritika Pandit, Jack Ochoa-Andersen, and Henry Loomis, in Jajwalya Karajgikar, Andrew Janco, and Jessica Otis, eds., DH2024 Book of Abstracts (2024), doi:10.5281/zenodo.13761066.

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 PROJECTS

“The Migrants’ Chronicles: 1892,” a historical educational game, with the Cologne Game Lab (TH Köln), Luxembourg University’s Faculty of Humanities Education and Social Sciences, et al (2024) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thkoeln.migrantschronicles&hl=en_US, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-migrants-chronicles-1892/id6469622697

“Virtual Viking Longship Project: A Study in the Future of Liberal Arts Teaching and Research,” with David Neville, Tim Arner, et al (2024) https://virtualvikings.sites.grinnell.edu/

“Witness to the Revolution,” a historical educational game, with Andrew Williams, Serena Zabin, et al (2023) https://www.wttrgame.com/

“Homeric Ship Model: an annotated 3D model to teach Greek nautical vocabulary from Homer’s Odyssey” with Rob Hardy, Dickinson College Commentaries online (2023) https://dcc.dickinson.edu/homeric-ship-model

“2020 Keywords: Definitions for #2020 crowdsourced by Carleton” with the Humanities Center, December 2020: https://2020keywords.sites.carleton.edu

“Virtual Gressenhall,” with Florence Wong and Susannah Ottaway, Carleton College, March 25, 2020. SketchUp. https://digitalcommons.carleton.edu/virtual_workhouse/1

“Digital Mapping for Humanists: A Cookbook,” Austin Mason, Victoria Morse, Louis Epstein, Hsiang-Lin Shih, et al. 2019 https://digital-carleton.gitbook.io/digital-mapping-for-humanists/

“Commentary on selections from Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica,” ed. Rob Hardy, Dickinson College Commentaries online (2017) http://dcc.dickinson.edu/bede-historia-ecclesiastica/intro/preface.

Ritual Landscapes in Pagan and Early Christian England: An interactive digital map (2017) http://go.carleton.edu/fragments6_mason_williamson

GET LOST, A psychogeography app for the WALK! festival at Carleton College, ArcGIS Online (Spring 2016)