Professor Andy Merrills is enjoying familiar and unfamiliar territory, both personally and professionally, as the Cook-Crone Bye-Fellow at Gonville & Caius College.
Returning to the location of his formative postgraduate education at Trinity College, Andy is familiar with Cambridge. He was also a postdoctoral researcher at King’s. A sabbatical from his teaching role at the University of Leicester has enabled him to expand his research on the history and archaeology of northern Africa in Late Antiquity (c. 300-700), joining Caius as a Bye-Fellow.
Andy completed his undergraduate degree in Modern History at The Queen’s College, Oxford before postgraduate study in Cambridge, postdoctoral study in the United States and his position at Leicester.
There were personal and professional reasons for applying for the Cook-Crone Bye-Fellowship, which Andy describes as “a tremendous privilege”.
He says: “There's an intensity to academic activity in my field at Cambridge that there isn’t anywhere else in the UK in the same way. It overlaps a bunch of different departments, History and Classics, most obviously, but also Archaeology, Middle Eastern Studies and Divinity. And as a result of that, there are all sorts of different seminars and people working on all kinds of different things. There are possibilities for conversations and the Library is very good as well.”
Andy has been made to feel very welcome at Caius and in the wider University as he embarks on a project which is likely to take at least the next five years and is in its infancy.
“This year is about having the time to sit down and see what the landscape is and see what I can do now, what the plausible next stages are going to be,” says Andy, who also has four journal articles planned.
With a nod to the late Professor Patricia Crone and Professor David Phillipson, an Emeritus Fellow, Andy’s focus is on Ethiopian material – “archaeological reports, the epigraphic studies, the historical texts and the interpretations, the secondary literature…” – and he hopes to visit Ethiopia in early 2025.
During his Bye Fellowship, Andy will be exploring the development of royal power in Aksumite Ethiopia as it is revealed in the inscriptions, coinage and archaeology of the region and textual sources from elsewhere. He is particularly interested in comparing the political and social institutions of this region with contemporary developments elsewhere in Africa, particularly in Nubia (modern Sudan), the Sahara and the Maghreb.
“This is the first time in ages where I've had to come back to something completely afresh and just try and make sense of it,” he adds. “It's one of those I really enjoyed doing as an undergraduate. It’s great.”
Andy’s academic work is focused on the time of the fall of the Roman Empire and northern Africa in that period. While he has researched specific regions and groups, such as The Vandals, Andy’s ambitious project is all-encompassing, building on excellent work by specialists.
“Thinking of all of Africa in this period, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, from the Sahara to the Mediterranean, would be an interesting intellectual exercise to recalibrate how we think about that historical period,” he says.
“Ultimately, what I would like to do is approach one of the most familiar narratives in western history – the ‘fall’ of the Roman Empire – from a wholly new, and African perspective. This is obviously very ambitious – and it won’t all be accomplished in one year – but Caius is providing a perfect setting to make a start on this.”