Helmut Reimitz

Helmut Reimitz (* 1965 ) is an Austrian medieval historian and university professor at Princeton University .

Reimitz studied history and communication science at the University of Vienna (Diploma 1994), passed his state examination in 1998 at the Institute for Austrian Historical Research and received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1999 as a pupil of Walter Pohl and Herwig Wolfram ( Der Codex Vindobonensis lat. 473. A Carolingian History book from St. Amand ). As a post-doctoral student he was employed in the project Boundaries and Difference in the Early Middle Ages in Vienna (with Walter Pohl ).

From 2004, Reimitz headed the Early Middle Ages department at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he had been since 1999. He was involved in the European research association Transformation of the Roman World and edited some of the volumes in which the results of the project funded by the European Science Foundation were published. In 2005/06 he worked as a visiting fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in the research group Rulers, History and Exegesis, The Formation ofa Political Identity in the Carolingian Empire with Mayke de Jong , Rosamond McKitterick and David Ganz . In 2008 he became an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Princeton University, where he was made a full professor in 2013. In 2013 he was Acting Director of the Program in Medieval Studies, 2015/16 acting chair of the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, since 2012 he has been part of the affiliated faculty of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York .

In his monograph History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity , published in 2015, Reimitz examines the diverse history of Franconian identity, the formation and transformation of ethnic identity and ethnicity from late antiquity to the end of the early Middle Ages. In this, as in other projects, he uses the handwritten transmission of texts to trace the political, cultural and religious restructuring and reorganization of Europe in the early Middle Ages, from the writing of the texts to their various rewritings in the handwritten copies and new versions that have been preserved. Further research areas are the history of historiography and historical thought, the perception of geographical spaces and the establishment of social and political borders and border areas, palaeography and manuscript studies of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Fonts (selection)

History, Frankish Identity and the Framing of Western Ethnicity, 550-850. Cambridge UP, 2015.
with Jamie Kreiner (Ed.): Motions of Late Antiquity. Essays on Religion, Politics, and Society in Honor of Peter Brown . Brepols, Turnhout 2016.
with Dan Rodgers and Bhavani Raman (eds.): Cultures in Motion. Princeton UP, 2013.
with Bernhard Zeller (Ed.): Past and present. Early Middle Ages and European culture of remembrance. Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 2009.
as publisher: State in the early Middle Ages. Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 2006.
with Christina Lutter: Romans and Barbarians. A reader on German history from late antiquity to 800. CH Beck, Munich 1997.
with Walter Pohl and Ian N. Wood (eds.): The transformation of frontiers. From late antiquity to the Carolingians. 2. Plenary Conference of the European Science Foundation's Program on “The Transformation of the Roman World” (Obernai, April 1996). Brill, Leiden 2001.
with Walter Pohl (ed.): Strategies of distinction. The construction of ethnic communities, 300-800. The transformation of the Roman world. A scientific program of the European Science Foundation. Brill, Leiden 1998.
The competition of origins in Franconian historiography. In: Walter Pohl (Ed.): The search for the origins. On the importance of the early Middle Ages. Vienna 2004, pp. 191–209.
The way to royalty in the historiographical compendia of the Carolingian era. In: Matthias Becher , Jörg Jarnut (Ed.): The dynasty change from 751. Prehistory, strategies of legitimation and memory. Münster 2004, pp. 277-320.

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personal data
SURNAME	Reimitz, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Austrian historian
DATE OF BIRTH	1965