Dr Edward Roberts

Dr Edward Roberts was born in Cumbria and raised in Denver, Colorado. He returned to the UK to study history, receiving a BA and MA from the University of Manchester and a PhD (2014) from the University of St Andrews. He then held research positions at King's College London and the Universidad del País Vasco (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain), followed by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Liverpool. He joined the University of Kent in 2018.

Edward is a historian of early medieval Europe with broad interests in politics, culture and law. His research focuses on the Carolingian Empire and its successor states (c.800-c.1100), exploring the ways by which European political, religious and social institutions were transformed and consolidated in this period. He has published on historical writing, bishops, canon law, languages, charters and documentary culture.

Edward’s first book, Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth Century, (Cambridge University Press, 2019), reassessed the works of one of tenth-century France’s most important authors. He has also co-edited (with Robert Gallagher and Francesca Tinti) The Languages of Early Medieval Charters: Latin, Germanic Vernaculars, and the Written Word (Brill, 2021), an interdisciplinary, comparative study of the relationship between language and documentary practices. He is currently writing a book about bishops, law and the growth of the institutional church between the Carolingian and Gregorian reforms (ninth to eleventh centuries). 

Edward teaches modules on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, offering upper-level modules on medieval violence and law, Vikings and the Carolingian Empire.

Edward supervises MA and PhD students working on a variety of early medieval topics. He would be happy to hear from prospective research students who wish to work on any aspect of continental European history, c.600–c.1100.    

Edward is Kent’s academic lead for the CHASE AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. He is co-convenor of the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is also reviews editor for Early Medieval Europe and an editor of Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages.