Spotlight on John Sabapathy

What is your role and what does it involve?

I've taught a range of courses to undergraduates and graduates, from medieval Latin, historiography and the history of rationality to courses that I teach currently on Christendom as a 'European union' in the 12th and 13th centuries and a course on an extraordinary period of both self-destructiveness and creativity about and around the papacy at the end of the 13th/start of the 14th centuries: if you like from Giotto and Dante on one side to the trial of the Templars and popes accused of heresy on the other. 

I'm also the department's undergraduate Admissions Tutor, which involves trying to make sense of the unhelpfully volatile policy and marketised environment that BA degrees exist in today.

How long have you been at UCL and what was your previous role?

I first came to UCL formally as a PhD student in the History department in 2006, though as a KCL MA student I'd already benefited from the federal system that allowed me to have my dissertation supervised here. 

I then came back as a Lecturer in 2010 having been a Junior Research Fellow briefly at St John's, Oxford in between. Before all of that, I'd worked for about 10 years in two think tanks where we focused on corporate accountability and sustainable development, working with companies, governmental departments, and NGOs of various shapes and sizes. That was lots of fun but, ultimately, far less satisfying intellectually than what I do now.

What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of?

I'm very pleased to have just won the Royal Historical Society's 2015 Whitfield Prize for British and Irish history for my first book Officers and Accountability in Medieval England 1170-1300. 

The book shows that this period was one in which a number of extremely creative, practical ways were developed to control the insolence of the growing number of officers. It also argues that historians have thought about how that happened with too great a fixation on The State (as opposed to experimentation by towns, churches, universities and on lords' estates too). 

The book also explores the tension between the prescriptiveness of formal ways of holding to account and the licence of giving someone responsibility. None of these issues seem particularly outdated today in their interest. 

I've also just co-organised a really fun, small conference on how medieval intellectuals shaped and were shaped by various institutions in numerous scholastic contexts. It brought together an extraordinary generational range of European scholars and was one of those conferences where everyone really was sparking off one another and the resonances between different scholars are properly thought-provoking.

Now, we want to turn a really amazing conference into a really valuable book.

Tell us about a project you are working on now which is top of you to-do list?

I'm working on a big book about 13th-century Europe for the new Oxford History of Medieval Europe series. I've been having lots of fun thinking about aspects of this with my undergraduates. It's arguably the most exciting period of the Middle Ages because of the scale, complexity and ambition of its political, religious, territorial, and intellectual developments.

A great deal of what one thinks of as characteristically 'medieval' belongs to this period. It's consequently a tremendous period of institutionalisation in the broadest senses and this will really be what the book is about. 

Again, the question of the coherence or dysfunctionality of an large-scale European project based on grand ideals but under immense strain and polarised demands from its constituent parts is somewhat resonant.

How humans have institutionalized both organizational forms and ways of doing things has therefore become a big general interest of mine, and one that has lots of implications far beyond (medieval) history. 

It seems to me in general that, even though institutions frame and shape our lives today to an absolutely extraordinary degree, we are extraordinarily unreflective about them. I'll be pleased if the book can contribute in even a small way to making people think 'institutions' is a really interesting and not a really boring word - and helps them to think about what that means.

What is your favourite album, film and novel?

Not absolutely, but recently: Alain Bashung, Bleu pétrole; Edgar Reitz, Die andere Heimat, James Salter, Light Years.

What is your favourite joke (pre-watershed)?

Favourite because it is my seven-year-old daughter's: 'What do you call a gorilla with bananas in its ears? Anything you like because he can't hear you.' The gorilla is fungible.

Who would be your dream dinner guests?

Assuming this is fantasy not séance, say John Cale, Mike John Harrison, Polly Jean Harvey, Blixa Bargeld, Geoffrey Hill, Roberto Calasso, Jonathan Meades, Verity Sharp, Alan Hollinghurst. It might well be disastrous, but at least the incidental music would be very good.

What advice would you give your younger self?

I think I'd give him Louis MacNeice's poem 'Thalassa'.

I'm also fond of this exchange from Shakespeare in Love, mutatis mutandis - comforting if untrue:

Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Fennyman: So what do we do?

Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

Fennyman: How?

Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.

What would it surprise people to know about you?

That I once walked through a minefield on the Chilean/Bolivian border without realising it? That hiking with friends on Bad Marriage Mountain in Montana we got lost and 'cliffed out' in a thunderstorm and had to jump across wet rock faces to get down? Are these surprising or merely ill-advised?

What is your favourite place?

Most of them are particular to their memory, but I enjoy a particular stretch of my walk home in the evenings through an avenue of lime trees, especially at this time of year.