Conor Kostick
Marie Curie Research Fellow, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Biography
I was awarded Nottingham University's Advanced Research Fellowship for 2012 - 2014 to explore the connections between the historical and natural data for medieval Europe, AD 400 - 1000. Subsequently, I obtained a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant to support the same project.
Before this, from 2006, I was a Research Associate at Trinity College Dublin, teaching and researching the field of the crusades, the subject of my doctorate. During that time I held a number of research grants, including the Irish Research Council's Post-Doctoral award (2007-9); the Marsh' Library Fellowship (2011); and a research grant from the Office of Public Works (2011).
I also write young-adult fantasy and was twice nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2012 and 2013). I was given the Special Merit award of the Reading Association of Ireland (2009).
Teaching Summary
I hold a diploma in: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and have an interest in developing active learning techniques for historians.
My main area of teaching is in regard to the crusades. I teach a masters level module on the subject and supervise PhD students whose projects are concerned with the crusades.
Research Summary
Understanding our environmental history is one of the most urgent research tasks facing humanity. Despite the necessity of improving our understanding of global environmental trends, our knowledge of… read more
Recent Publications
CONOR KOSTICK, 2013. Courage and Cowardice on the First Crusade 1096-1099 War in History.
CONOR KOSTICK, 2013. Strongbow: The Normans in Ireland O'Bien Press. (In Press.)
CONOR KOSTICK, 2012. The Trial By Fire of Peter Bartholomew: A case study in medieval social conflict Leidschrift. 27(3), 12 (In Press.)
KOSTICK, C, ed., 2011. The crusades and the near east Abingdon : Routledge.
Current Research
Understanding our environmental history is one of the most urgent research tasks facing humanity. Despite the necessity of improving our understanding of global environmental trends, our knowledge of environmental conditions in the period AD 400 - 1000 is very limited compared to that for the years post AD 1200. Yet very recent advances in regard to obtaining scientific natural proxy data and the ability to locate and analyse a significant corpus of historical European documents offer the prospect of an invaluable insight into the climate of the early medieval era.
For the duration of the fellowship I will be working with Europe's annals and chronicles to compile accurate environmental data from the documentary sources for the period AD 400 - 1000. Using modern historical source criticism to indicate the prospective reliability of the information obtained from the documents, the results will be put into a database in a form that will allow statistically valid comparison with scientific environmental natural 'proxy' data.
The goal of this research proposal, however, is not just to compile an innovative database of early medieval environmental information, but to use the comparison with the scientific proxy data to provide answers to very fundamental and 'high level' questions such as whether there was a Medieval Warm Period? Or: what were the societal consequences of abrupt climatic changes and extreme weather events? And perhaps most important of all: how anomalous is the recent large-scale phase of climate warming?
Past Research
My past research includes leading a branch of Trinity College Dublin's Centre for Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies 2008-12 project, 'Conflict and Cohabitation' by applying the theme to the subject of the crusades. The resulting collection of essays was published by Routledge in 2010 as The Crusades and the Near East.
In 2011, I identified a 'lost' copy of Gerald of Wales's Topograhia Hibernica, held in what until 2008 had been a private library collected by Benjamin Guinness but today is part of Marsh's Library, based at Farmleigh, the Irish Government's official State Guest House. As a result of this discovery, I was awarded the 2011 Marsh's Library Fellowship, which combined with a grant from the Irish Government's Office of Public Works, allowed me to evaluate the manuscript and provide the Office of Public Works with the materials for a public exhibition on the manuscript and its author.
From 2007 - 9 I was a post-doctoral fellow of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), with the award going to a proposal to re-evaluate the Second Crusade with a view to creating a comprehensive understanding of the social complexity of the expedition and by comparison with the First Crusade, gain some insight into Europe's social developments over the two generations between the crusades.
Following my post-doctoral award, I researched and published a monograph, The Siege of Jerusalem: Conquest and Crusade in 1099 (Continuum, 2009).
My PhD was an attempt to apply an historical materialist approach to the First Crusade and it resulted in the monograph, The Social Structure of the First Crusade (Brill, 2008).