Biography
I am a trained historian and art historian with a background in classics. While I mostly deal with topics of medieval ideology and especially concentrating on Hohenstaufen era Germany and Italy, I am deeply interested in how tradition is being kept alive, reforged and adapted for the purposes of new social and political structures and constellations. In order to take up the study of tradition and its medieval lifelines, I first undertook a BA in history and art history in Rijeka (Croatia), culminating in my undergraduate thesis on the political iconography of Frederick Barbarossa. Believing that I had barely scratched the surface of my subject, I continued working on the same for another two years at the CEU (Budapest, Hungary), this time investigating how a large number of sources focused on the idealised Charlemagne and his palace at Aachen. Upon the completion of my MA thesis, I took a year studying the classics and the Bible in order to approach the sources on their own terms, trying to gain a better understanding of the possible medieval interpretations of these mostly classical texts. I am now returning to the subject of my MA thesis, albeit on a larger scale: this time around my goal is to put all the Aachen-related material of the Hohenstaufen dynasty into perspective and to determine the extent of ideological continuity in Aachen in the Hohenstaufen era.
