Professor John Sabapathy

Professor of History

John Sabapathy is Professor of History and works on the comparative history of Europe/Christendom primarily in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. He also works on the Anthropocene (the period in which humans became geological forces globally), and co-convenes UCL Anthropocene – a major initiative in this area.

His monograph Officers and Accountability in Medieval England, 1170-1300, a study of English officers in a European context, won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize for 2015. An edited collection on Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism was published in 2020. He is an editor at The English Historical Review.

John is working on three projects. The Cultivation of Christendom is a wide-ranging study of thirteenth-century Europe for the new ‘Oxford History of Medieval Europe’ series. Emergency History demonstrates the value of history in analysing past, present, and emerging crises, focusing particularly on environments, institutions and rationalities. Goodbye Cockaigne! analyses the long tradition of that medieval la-la land for the perspectives it offers on sex, food, youth, work, leisure and pleasure. It was the subject of his inaugural lecture at UCL.

Before returning to UCL (where he took his PhD), he was a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford. Between his BA and graduate degrees, John worked in public policy on sustainable development and corporate accountability with a range of international think tanks, NGOs, corporations, and British and European governmental bodies.

PhD supervision

John is happy to discuss research proposals from students on topics addressing the political, environmental, intellectual, religious and/or cultural history of medieval Europe as well as topics related to the Anthropocene more widely. You should get in touch at the start of the academic year in which you wish to apply.

Supervision: John currently supervises Joe Hopper (the art of community at St Victor, Paris; UCL funded); Hugo Raine (northern Italian communal politics; UCL funded), and second supervises Mahima Khan (teaching and ethics in medieval madrasas; LAHP funded). He has supervised/co-supervised theses on sight and trust in medieval optics and theology (Dr Genevieve Caulfield, LAHP funded); Polish ecclesiastical institutions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Dr Agata Zielinska, LAHP funded), thirteenth-century queens’ letters (Dr Anaïs Waag), and second supervised theses on medieval magic tricks (Dr Vanessa Da Silva Baptista); lying, deceit and casuistry (Dr Emily Corran, LAHP funded), ideals of elite conduct in Norway, Denmark and England (Dr Louisa Taylor), and papal overlordship (Dr Benedict Wiedemann, LAHP funded).

Major publications

‘Cannibal, scorpion, horse, owl: institutional hypocrites and the early fourteenth-century church’, The Church, Hypocrisy and Dissimulation, Studies in Church History 60 (2024), pp. 91-120
‘Gui Foucois, la « réforme », le Midi et l’Angleterre’, Pape Clément IV, et le Midi, Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 57 (2023), pp. 299-333
‘The emperor between person and institution: officer, office and accountability in Dante’s imperial thinking’, in María Ángeles Martín Romera and Hannes Ziegler (ed.), The Officer and the People: Accountability and Authority in Premodern Europe, Studies of the German Historical Institute, London (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 53–75
‘Making public knowledge – making knowledge public: Territorial, reparative, heretical and canonization inquiries and Gui Foucois (c.1200-1268)’, in Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge, ed. Christine van Oertzen and Sebastian Felten, Journal for the History of Knowledge 1/1 (2020), pp. 1-21
Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism, co-edited with Antonia Fitzpatrick (Royal Historical Society/Institute of Historical Research: London, 2020)
‘Introduction: individuals and institutions in medieval scholasticism’, with Antonia Fitzpatrick, in Fitzpatrick and Sabapathy (ed.), Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism, pp. 1-48
‘Robert of Courson’s systematic thinking about early thirteenth-century institutions’, in Fitzpatrick and Sabapathy (ed.), Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism, pp. 197-214
‘Some difficulties in forming persecuting societies before Lateran IV canon 8: Robert of Courson thinks about communities and inquisition’, in Gert Melville and Johannes Helmrath (ed.), The Fourth Lateran Council: Institutional Reform and Spiritual Renewal (Didymos-Verlag, 2017), pp. 175-200
‘Thinking politically with Innocent III: Prudence and providence’, Thirteenth-Century England 15, Authority and Resistance in the Age of Magna Carta. Proceedings of the Aberystwyth and Lampeter Conference, 2013 (Boydell and Brewer, 2015), pp. 115–136
Officers and Accountability in Medieval England 1170-1300 (Oxford University Press, 2014)

For a full list of publications, see John’s Iris profile.

Projects and fellowships

Directeur d’études invité, EHESS, Centre Alexandre-Koyré, (April 2022)
Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow, ‘The institutionalization of Europe in the thirteenth century’ (2018–2019)
Visiting Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2019)
Working Group Member, ‘History of Bureaucratic Knowledge’, Department II, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (2018-2019)
UCL-Oxford University project ‘Individuals and institutions in Medieval Scholasticism’, CO-PI with Dr Antonia Fitzpatrick (formerly Oxford University).

Media

Contributor to UCL podcast, ‘COVID-19 – the whole story’ on the history of epidemics, 2020
‘Inquests and accountability: on the Iraq Inquiry’, History Today, online (5th July 2016)
Financial Times video on parallels between the ‘gig’ (e.g. Uber/Deliveroo) and ‘feudal’ economies, 2016
Wrote and presented a documentary (Inside Job Productions) marking the 2012 millennium of St Alfege’s Church, Greenwich (St Alfege/Ælfheah was an archbishop of Canterbury, possibly martyred in 1012 by being battered to death by ox bones at a drunken Viking banquet)

Teaching

Anthropocene Studies (GEOG0183, final year 1 term UG module, on offer from 2024)
Gaia’s Ancestors: Approaches to Medieval Ecologies and Environments (HIST0905 MA 1 term module, on offer from 2024)
Making Medieval Europe: Christendom 1150-1350 (HIST0033, undergraduate 1st–second year survey module)
Emergency History: A Natural History of Humanity for the Present (HIST0399, undergraduate 2nd–final year thematic module)
COVID-19 in Social and Historical Perspective (ANTH0212, final year 1 term cross-Faculty module)
The Invention of the Question: A History of European Thinking, 1100–1400 (MDVL0054, MA 1 term module)
Between Rome & Avignon: Antichrists, heretics, princes & the papacy 1294–1334 (final year undergraduate special subject, not on offer 2020-1)