Bjarke Bach Christensen
My doctoral research supervised by Prof. Peter Sarris focuses on establishing a social and economic context for the countryside of Byzantine North Africa, c. 530-700. It focuses in particular on how Romano-African rural communities experienced the re-institution of imperial power after the reconquest of Justinian, and on the fate of the great estates which had dominated the rural landscape of the region in the late Roman period.
Prior to coming to Cambridge I completed a BA and an MA in Modern History at the University of Copenhagen, before subsequently spending a year as research assistant to Prof. Peter Fibiger Bang.
In addition to my specific research on late Roman North Africa, I am more generally interested in the rural society and economy of the late Roman West, c. 200-700. Especially in terms of rural debt, estate commodification, ownership patterns and changing settlement hierarchies and landscapes.