Dr. Matthew Kinloch

CV

Matthew Kinloch is a researcher in intellectual history in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. He is currently the principal investigator of a Research Council of Norway’s Researcher Project for Young Talents, entitled Narrative Hierarchies: Minor Characters in Byzantine and Medieval History Writing.

He has previously held research fellowships/postdocs at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library (Harvard University), the University of Vienna, Boğaziçi University, and Villa I Tatti (Harvard University).

He holds a doctorate in History from the University of Oxford (2018), an MRes in Byzantine Studies from the University of Birmingham (2014), and a BA in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History from the Durham University (2013).

Publikationen (Auswahl)

Kinloch, M., ‘Publication and Citation Practices: Enclosure, Extractivism, and Gatekeeping in Byzantine Studies’, in B. Anderson and M. Ivanova (eds), Towards a Critical Historiography of Byzantine Studies (State College: Penn State University Press, 2023), 133–142.

Kinloch, M., ‘Imagining Action: Explanation in Twentieth-Century Historiographical and Fictional Rewritings of the Chronicle of Morea’, in M. Kulhánková and P. Marciniak (eds), Byzantium in the Popular Imagination: The Modern Reception of the Byzantine Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 207–224.

Kinloch, M., ‘Stories of Emperors, Sultans, and Cities: Comparing Protagonists in the Histories of Doukas and Leonardo Bruni’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 46 (2022), 196–213.

Kinloch, M., ‘In the Name of the Father, the Husband, or Some Other Man: The Subordination of Female Characters in Byzantine Historiography’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 74 (2020), 303–328.

Kinloch, M. and MacFarlane, A. (eds), Trends and Turning Points: Constructing the Late Antique and Byzantine World (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

FRIAS-Projekt

Minor Characters in Byzantine Historiographical Narrative

Like most narratives, histories from the medieval eastern Roman empire (or Byzantium) distribute narrative space and prominence unequally between their characters. Emperors and other elite Byzantine men invariably occupy more prominent roles than labourers, women, slaves, and foreigners. The relative importance of historiography amongst the limited surviving textual traces of Byzantium has resulted in the logics and hierarchies of both the character systems of these texts and a specific tradition of reading them being reproduced and naturalised by modern reconstructions of the Byzantine past.

This project will explore the narrative functions of ostensibly ‘minor’ characters in a key corpus of late Byzantine (c. 1200–1460 AD) histories, with a specific focus on non-elite and non-male characters. Ultimately it aims to challenge the stories that modern historians have tended to tell with and through these texts. This requires the development of an analytic framework capable both of alternative modes of reading Byzantine history writing and of critical engagement with the disciplinary regimes that govern any engagement with this textual tradition. To do this, this project will draw on a range of relevant traditions, from narrative theories of character to queer approaches to historiography.