Medievalist expert Matthias M. Tischler, UAB's new ICREA professor

Professor Matthias M. Tischler was born in 1968 in Münchberg, Germany. He is a world-wide leading specialist for the tradition of Carolingian culture and its effects on identity building in medieval Europe.

He is currently co-directing (together with four partners in Berlin, St Andrews, Exeter and Vienna) the new comparative HERA-project "After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Crisis of the Carolingian World, c.900‒c.1050" (UNUP). The project will last three years (2016-2019) and is funded with 1.2 M Euros. It deals with the role of Carolingian culture in processes of identity building in the peripheries of post-Carolingian Europe, ans will be built on case studies such as Catalonia.

Another project he is working on is the development of a new master narrative of counteracting collective religious memories in transcultural medieval Europe with a special focus on the interrelationship between the biblical, historical and scholastic legacies of the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean World and beyond.

Becoming the ICREA Senior Research Professor in January consolidates his collaboration with the UAB's Institut d’Estudis Medievals (IEM), where in 2013 and 2014 he worked on a project on Muḥammad in Latin medieval historiography sponsored by the Gerda Henkel Foundation in the framework of the ERC/M4HUMAN programme.

Professor Tischler studied Medieval and Modern History, Applied Historical Sciences, Classical and Medieval Latin, and Romance Philology at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich (1989‒1995). After completing a PhD on the genesis, transmission and reception of Einhart’s Vita Karoli (Heidelberg 1998), he was a Post-graduate Fellowship Holder at the Institut Historique Allemand, Paris (1998‒1999) and at the Zentrum für Mittelalterstudien of the University of Bamberg (1999‒2001). Later he worked as a Research Assistant, Scientific Collaborator and Assistant Professor at the Hugo von Sankt Viktor-Institut of the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt am Main and at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main (2001‒2009), where he studied Philosophy, Theology, Islam and Christian-Muslim Encounters. After completing his thesis of habilitation on the biblical legacy of the Augustinian abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris, a centre of scholastic learning with European-wide attraction and radiance between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries (Dresden 2008‒2009), he continued with his research and teaching as an Associate Professor of Medieval and Transcultural History at the Technical University of Dresden (until 2012). More recently, he was visiting professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études de París (2015) and visiting researcher at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (2016).

Prof. Tischler is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies, published by de Gruyter, Berlin e. a. since 2014, as well as co-editor of several international book series, published by Aschendorff, Obrador Edèndum etc.