Hervin Fernández-Aceves
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, National Researcher Candidate
My research interests lie in the intersection of relational sociology, Mediterranean history and medieval studies. I have refined new methodologies based on prosopography, diplomatics and digital humanities. My most recent monograph draws on my doctoral research to illustrate and reassess the often overlooked role of the Italo-Norman nobility, where I explain the shifting composition of the upper aristocracy in southern Italy and offer a new understanding of how territorial leaderships operated under the Sicilian kingdom.
I am currently carrying out research on medieval Sardinia and the understanding and representation of its society and political autonomy, as part of the AHRC-funded project 'Power, society, and (dis)connectivity in medieval Sardinia'. To this day, little is known of the island’s socio-political dynamics during the central Middle Ages (late tenth to twelfth centuries A.D.), and, in the light of the available chartulary evidence, a reconsideration of the four independent Sardinian kingdoms (giudicati) is necessary. The particular interest of my research is, evidence-wise, in charters, diplomas, condaghes and other Sardinian documentary sources, especially their capacity to express and invent mechanisms of social control, from ideological to economic and military. Thematically, I am interested in these polities and their effective authority; namely, how the giudicati tended the social networks which kept their power up and running. My research seeks to elicit the social and political relations between the rulers, the rural elites, small landholders, and the wider population to offer a new explanation of networked and negotiated modalities of power and social interaction.
I received my Licentiate (5-year programme) in Political Sciences and Public Administration at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). I then graduated from the Central European University, in Budapest, gaining a distinction in the double MA in History and Interdisciplinary Medieval Studies, and being awarded both the Pro-Rector’s Academic Excellence prize and the Zvetlana-Mihaela Tănasă Annual Excellence Award for my dissertation. I took up the post of University Research Scholar at the University of Leeds in 2013, conducting my PhD studies in the Institute for Medieval Studies and the School of History. At Leeds, I received a CONACYT Overseas scholarship, was awarded the annual extraordinary research prize, and served as the elected president of the Mexican Society of the University Union. I was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 2018. I began my postdoctoral research on Medieval Sardinia, first as Visiting Research Fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, and then as an Award-holder at the British School at Rome.
Supervisors: Alex Metcalfe, Graham A. Loud, Niels Gaul, and Omar Guerrero Orozco
Address: Bowland College, LA1 4YT, Lancaster
I am currently carrying out research on medieval Sardinia and the understanding and representation of its society and political autonomy, as part of the AHRC-funded project 'Power, society, and (dis)connectivity in medieval Sardinia'. To this day, little is known of the island’s socio-political dynamics during the central Middle Ages (late tenth to twelfth centuries A.D.), and, in the light of the available chartulary evidence, a reconsideration of the four independent Sardinian kingdoms (giudicati) is necessary. The particular interest of my research is, evidence-wise, in charters, diplomas, condaghes and other Sardinian documentary sources, especially their capacity to express and invent mechanisms of social control, from ideological to economic and military. Thematically, I am interested in these polities and their effective authority; namely, how the giudicati tended the social networks which kept their power up and running. My research seeks to elicit the social and political relations between the rulers, the rural elites, small landholders, and the wider population to offer a new explanation of networked and negotiated modalities of power and social interaction.
I received my Licentiate (5-year programme) in Political Sciences and Public Administration at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). I then graduated from the Central European University, in Budapest, gaining a distinction in the double MA in History and Interdisciplinary Medieval Studies, and being awarded both the Pro-Rector’s Academic Excellence prize and the Zvetlana-Mihaela Tănasă Annual Excellence Award for my dissertation. I took up the post of University Research Scholar at the University of Leeds in 2013, conducting my PhD studies in the Institute for Medieval Studies and the School of History. At Leeds, I received a CONACYT Overseas scholarship, was awarded the annual extraordinary research prize, and served as the elected president of the Mexican Society of the University Union. I was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 2018. I began my postdoctoral research on Medieval Sardinia, first as Visiting Research Fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, and then as an Award-holder at the British School at Rome.
Supervisors: Alex Metcalfe, Graham A. Loud, Niels Gaul, and Omar Guerrero Orozco
Address: Bowland College, LA1 4YT, Lancaster
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The challenge of how to ‘read’ the text hence became the main focus of my research. In order to focus on the information on social and political processes embedded in the text, I needed to transform Ps.-Falcandus’ rhetoricised periods into a relational dataset; it was necessary to place the relations, not the individuals, at the centre of the study. The first requirement of such an attempt was to present the process of translating a textual structure into a sociological construct, namely, a socio-relational dataset. After the whole Liber de Regno Sicilie was rewritten through Franzosi’s Quantitative Narrative Analysis, I obtained a dataset that divides the social information embedded in the narrative into 420 events. The total number of attested social interactions, coded as semantic triplets, is 1174, together with 89 social relationships also explicitly attested in the narrative. Each interaction and relationship defines an edge that connects two characters. The dataset thus provides a series of narrative sociomatrices ready to be parsed through network analytical tools. Although not all the resulting measures proved to be useful or provided interesting insights for understanding the Liber’s implications, the overall results are a valuable addition to the perspective of the source, and are particularly useful for providing more nuanced images of the historical text. Measures of centrality and prestige proved useful when exploring only the narrative interactions of influence and communication within the royal court. Furthermore, blockmodelling turned out to be a promising approach for understanding the entire text’s social dimensions, for the structurally equivalent positions strongly suggest the narrative roles used by the author for constructing a social system.
hypothesis is that a relational approach can contribute to the understanding of written sources and their authors' social and
political stand. The first problem to address is attempting to define the meaning of narrative, and its structural features. After that, I shall identify a complex system of social interactions within the narrative structure. Then, the historical interaction system will be proposed to be represented as a narrative network of actors. The central idea of this approach
is that the meaning of individuals and communities in a narrative is conditional on their position in a network of social
relationships constructed by the author. Hence, a central problem when dealing with historical sources is framing and
organising the author's perspective of personal and collective connections in order to understand better the role of both
the witness (viz. the persona that emerges from the historical narrative) and its testimony as reflected by the text. I will
illustrate this proposed method with respect to a single narrative case: pseudo-Falcandus' account on the Sicilian royal
court. This historia became a fundamental text for the understanding of the Norman kingdom of Sicily in the second half
of the twelfth century. The encounters, agreements, bargaining, gossiping, manoeuvring, and plotting described by the
author offer us a complex interaction system of a medieval court society, and by using the proposed method I attempt to
reconstruct and analyse such a system.
The challenge of how to ‘read’ the text hence became the main focus of my research. In order to focus on the information on social and political processes embedded in the text, I needed to transform Ps.-Falcandus’ rhetoricised periods into a relational dataset; it was necessary to place the relations, not the individuals, at the centre of the study. The first requirement of such an attempt was to present the process of translating a textual structure into a sociological construct, namely, a socio-relational dataset. After the whole Liber de Regno Sicilie was rewritten through Franzosi’s Quantitative Narrative Analysis, I obtained a dataset that divides the social information embedded in the narrative into 420 events. The total number of attested social interactions, coded as semantic triplets, is 1174, together with 89 social relationships also explicitly attested in the narrative. Each interaction and relationship defines an edge that connects two characters. The dataset thus provides a series of narrative sociomatrices ready to be parsed through network analytical tools. Although not all the resulting measures proved to be useful or provided interesting insights for understanding the Liber’s implications, the overall results are a valuable addition to the perspective of the source, and are particularly useful for providing more nuanced images of the historical text. Measures of centrality and prestige proved useful when exploring only the narrative interactions of influence and communication within the royal court. Furthermore, blockmodelling turned out to be a promising approach for understanding the entire text’s social dimensions, for the structurally equivalent positions strongly suggest the narrative roles used by the author for constructing a social system.
Applicants are kindly asked to send a 200-word abstract and a short academic biography by the 18th March 2017 at the following email address: [email protected]
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