My work, primarily based on the rich spread of documentary material of turn-of-the-millennium Catalonia, asks important questions about the working of medieval power. How can we reconcile a personal authority with the necessity of delegating to others? What was the identity of power once so delegated? How was the connection from centre to locality maintained? When it broke down, why did it do so? The Catalan material allows us to address questions of power relations in new ways, identifying the paths through personal connections by which delegated power reached the ground, or for want of which it could become lost. From this work models for the operation of authority in other areas are already emerging and my published work has begun to bring these issues into the open.

This work and other articles I have in draft use these approaches, developed in my doctoral thesis, "Pathways to Power in Late-Carolingian Catalonia", to open questions about interpretation of events and documentary material. Using the latest thinking in both the historiography of medieval power and the study of charters, I am participating in an important change in the way historians use documentary material. It is already recognised in a few quarters that charters and such documents may contain narrative or even literary statements of propaganda, but such observations have yet to be subject to the same rigour of analysis as other medieval texts, asking who actually produced the documents, how they were used or why they were kept. Only when these questions are commonplace can programs and intentions be properly deduced.

I also have a more teaching-based currency with research on medieval European history in general. I am also an experienced and trained teacher at undergraduate level. My recent lectures at King's College London have been well received and the tutorials have covered a wide range of topics. Birkbeck’s mix of pupil backgrounds however meant I had to successfully interest students of very different backgrounds, and I believe both from their comments and from their results that I did so. The experience I have amassed therefore includes seminar classes led by pupil discussion, full-scale lectures, revision classes and individual tutorials. At Birkbeck, furthermore, the course also involved heavy reliance on distance learning techniques to overcome the default absence of both teacher and students from the campus; as a result I explored the possibility of electronic resources and with the course leader’s approval transferred the course material to an online format, revising it as I went. I was also instrumental in getting my lecture materials uploaded to the web at KCL in support of a future merging of courses.

Communicating the interest of the medieval period by whatever means possible, both at student and at research levels, has therefore been the stamp of my career so far. This, with my extensive electronic resources and IT experience, the training in palaeography, codicology and diplomatic conveyed by my Masters degree, and my editorial, database, numismatic and bibliographical work in Cambridge and London Universities and the experience of different techniques and fields they have given me, makes me well-prepared to contribute to an institution in almost any way that may be desirable.