International Visiting Researchers

WIVA serves as a vibrant hub where scholars and researchers from across the globe come to contribute to our Centre's dynamic environment. Our visiting researchers bring fresh insights, and specialized expertise, filling our Centre with new ideas and exciting collaborations.

Here, you can learn about their research projects, areas of focus, and the unique contributions they are making to WIVA and the broader academic community.

Charlemagne’s elephant is an extraordinary story, but he fits into a wider picture of contact between Europe and the Islamic world. This contact could be hostile, as demonstrated by invading armies and raiding pirates of the period. But it could also be peaceful. Christian pilgrims travelled to holy sites in the Caliphate such as Jerusalem and merchants crossed the Mediterranean in large numbers.

Much of my research is concerned with these contacts. In my first book, The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne (Princeton University Press, 2023), I examined diplomacy between the Carolingian empire and the Islamic world. It was particularly important for me to place relations Muslim relations with the Franks in the context of the political environment of the Islamic world. Harun al-Rashid’s dealings with Charlemagne did not take place in a vacuum but were shaped by the other concerns he had.

It's important for me that we recognise that the early medieval world was a deeply interconnected place, shaped by movement and migration. Like modern leaders, medieval rulers juggled multiple issues at the same time and we need to think about different pressures and opportunities interacted with each other if we want to understand the decisions that they made. We should also note that even groups apparently at odds with each other, such as early medieval Christians and Muslims, could nonetheless do business with each other in the right circumstances, even if it was not always easy. These are themes that I want to bring to bear on my research with the WiVA Centre.

The Franks were not the only people at this time who were interested in the Caliphate. The vikings also had tight links with the Islamic world. Vast numbers of silver dirhams have been found in Scandinavia from this period, while Arabic writers such as Ibn Fadlan discuss their encounters with them. In my current research, as with my earlier work on the Franks, I place that contact in the context of the politics of the Caliphate. In particular, following the ‘Anarchy at Samarraʿ’ (861-870) in which a run of short-lived caliphs were held prisoner by their own soldiers, the late ninth century saw powerful dynasties take over important provinces of the Caliphate. I think this had important implications for viking involvement in the Islamic world.

This is why I’m so excited to be here in Uppsala with the WiVA Centre. As with Charlemagne’s elephant, I see the movement of exotic animals as a window into contact and relations. I’m beginning by thinking about how the supply of arctic falcons from Scandinavia was shaped by the struggle for power in the Caliphate in the late ninth century. The Centre’s focus on placing the vikings in a wider context aligns perfectly with this work. I’m surrounded by people who are thinking deeply about the vikings and the wider world and who have expertise in Scandinavia in the period and in material culture that I’m already benefitting from.

The ninth-century Caliphate was a complicated and mesmerising place. I want to place Scandinavians within it and make them part of this vast, multifaceted and endlessly fascinating world.

More about Dr. Samuel's work can be found on his blog

What are some career highlights or milestones that you are particularly proud of?

- Recently, I was curator of the exhibition A Viking Life, in the state-of the-art Gaiás Centre Museum in Galicia.

- I was awarded a Bernadotte research scholarship at the Onomastics Department, University of Uppsala.

- I directed the first Viking Studies seminar in Spain.

What is the main focus of your current research, and why is it important?

After years of investigating viking contact in the Iberian Peninsula, mostly with Galicia but also al-Andalus, I am now centred on the question of settlement. This implies a large change in general perceptions of what type of contact took place in Iberia, traditionally understood as having been subjected only to raiding activities. Vikings did settle in Iberia, though not in large numbers, and the sociopolitical motivations behind each instance of settlement are different and complex, as are the relationships between settled groups and local inhabitants.

What specific projects or research activities will you be working on during these three months?

During my time with WIVA, I will be working on some aspects of viking migration, especially paying attention to a group of Norse settlements in northwest Iberia.

What do you hope to achieve or contribute during your time with us?

Conversation and ideas exchange with WIVA staff and visiting scholars will enrichen the research done while I'm at WIVA and thereafter. I would like the daily informal interactions and the different seminar and community days organised by WIVA to influence my work and help evolve my ideas. Equally, I hope to contribute with my specific knowledge on Iberia and my methodological experience to group discussions. I think it likely that all these new exchanges will lead to future collaborations.

How do you see your work aligning with or complementing our Centre's goals or mission?

I have admired the Centre's mission since its conception, as it so firmly aligns with my own views on Viking-Age research and the promotion of healthy academic environments. The Centre's emphasis on collaboration and interdisciplinarity is as appealing to me as their spotlight on diversity. The latter is fundamental for analysing the Viking Age as a time of complex multicultural interchange, emphasising the myriad ways in which vikings interacted with the many peoples of the northern hemisphere. As a researcher used to working on the southern diaspora, something uncommon in existing academic circles, the Centre's focus on the south and the east is a welcome embrace to geographical areas of research that have for too long not been central to Viking Studies.

What excites you most about collaborating with our team and being part of our Centre?

The value they place on the diversity of approaches, the opportunities for debate about new and under-researched issues, the contact with scholars from around the world with compatible or completely new perspectives, the learning from staff and visiting researchers, the exciting possibilities for collaboration.

What impact do you hope your research will have, either in the academic community or beyond?

New knowledge on migration to the southern diaspora will bring this geographical area into generalised debates of the Viking Age and will contribute to understanding Norse migration elsewhere. It will also help paint a complex, nuanced picture of the level of multicultural interaction and cohabitation in the Viking Age.

I have carried out much of my research based at the Allahabad Museum, a national museum under the Indian Ministry of Culture. After my retirement from the position of director, I joined the Prime Ministers Museum in New Delhi as Officer on Special Duty in 2023. After my contract period at the PMS, I joined the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science as Senior Research Fellow from April to July 2024. The project at Max Planck, with the research on it ongoing, focuses on the transmission of astral imageries from the ancient Mediterranean to India in the early centuries CE. I consider it a highlight of my career to be currently part of the WIVA centre as Visiting Researcher. My other engagements include the editorship of the Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology, published by the Indian Archaeological Society, New Delhi and being part of the curation committee of the National Maritime Museum of India coming up near the Bronze Age port of Lothal in western India.

My research theme at the WIVA centre is titled ‘Scandinavian Connections with South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region in the Late Iron Age – Viking Age Periods (400 – 1000 CE)’. My study aims to examine the spread of Viking exchange networks from Scandinavia through western Europe, the Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions to ‘supply chains’ extending into the Indian Ocean region. In this context, I will study a range of potentially South Asian and Indian Ocean artefacts excavated from Viking sites. These artefacts include various types of glass beads, semiprecious stone beads, cowrie shells, garnets and a recently discovered Buddha like figure. I will carry out the study on Viking networks in ‘deep time’, examining the distribution of trade artefacts in pre-Viking Iron Age levels in Scandinavia.

The Centre has put forward a research framework which breaks popular stereotypes about Viking society and approaches the Viking Age as one of widespread contact, trade, new settlement patterns and innovation. My work on long distance exchange networks investigating Viking connections with the Indian Ocean world fits into the new ‘global’ worldview of the WIVA centre.

What excites you most about collaborating with our team and being part of our Centre?

As one who has visited Uppsala several times, I have a comfortable feeling of belonging. Besides meeting with old colleagues, it is exciting that the WIVA centre is bringing together visiting researchers specialising in far flung connections of the Viking world with Newfoundland, the Iberian peninsula, central Asia and the Indian Ocean world. I think this is a unique cohabitation of scholars studying different aspects of the World in the Viking Age.

What impact do you hope your research will have, either in the academic community or beyond?

I believe the research at WIVA is global in scope. The Viking networks emanating out of Scandinavia across Eurasia allow the creation of a template to ‘integrate’ the Indian Ocean world with the Eurasian Silk Routes. I take this as an opportunity to study long distance maritime networks in complement with the extended land routes. The Eurasian – Indian Ocean integration promises to open up new research avenues and also facilitate cultural policy making.

My work utilises data from a variety of sources, including ‘natural’ archives such as stratified accumulations of peat and soils as well as more traditional written and digital archives. Currently, I am Co-I with Véronique Forbes (PI) on a SSRHC Insight grant entitled ‘Biocultural and Archaeological Legacies at L’Anse aux Meadows’. This project seeks to integrate renewed archaeological research at L’Anse aux Meadows, the site of a late Viking Age settlement in northern Newfoundland, with legacy collections.

During my stay at the Centre for the World in the Viking Age I most looking forward to the inspiration and exchange of ideas that working within such a grouping can offer. L’Anse aux Meadows, lies at the westernmost extent of the Norse world in Viking Age and I am particular keen to reconnect with old colleagues and meet new ones to share the results of the past six years working at this site. To this end I will be working on a bringing new palaeoenvironmental data from L’Anse aux Meadows to publication that demonstrates the link with Viking Age settlements in the wider North Atlantic. Related to this, I will present a departmental seminar outlining some observations on the geographical and environmental setting of L’Anse aux Meadows. This I see as a means to thinking through how this iconic site is related to ideas of Vinland. I am hoping that my stay at the centre, and the opportunity to visit Norse sites throughout Scandinavia will provide new insights and inspiration for exploring what L’Anse aux Meadows meant in the Viking Age world.

My academic background in both Scandinavian and steppe history reflects this dual interest. I hold a doctorate in history and medieval studies from the University of Debrecen (Hungary) and Central European University (Austria). My research has increasingly turned toward the underexplored role of steppe cultures in Viking history, particularly in relation to the Magyars. My book, Vikings of the Steppe: Scandinavians, Rus’ and the Turkic World (c. 750–1050) (Routledge, 2023), reflects this interest.

At WiVA, I’m excited to contribute to a broader, more connected understanding of the Viking Age—one that looks beyond traditional geographic boundaries. My work supports WiVA’s mission to bring the Silk Roads and the ‘Viking Age East’ into the forefront of scholarly attention, helping to reframe how we understand early medieval global connections. With support from the Bernadotte scholarship, I’m currently spending six months investigating the eastern contacts of Viking Age Birka through its rich grave material. For me, this is a unique opportunity to engage directly with artefacts that speak to cultural connections between Sweden and the steppe world—connections that have rarely been studied from a Hungarian perspective. I hope to uncover the identities and stories of those buried in Birka with mounted oriental belt sets, sabretaches, caftans, and other remarkable traces of eastern connection.

I have been a faculty member of the Department of Archaeology at Memorial University (Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada) since January 2018, which is when I began to work on the UNESCO World Heritage site of L’Anse aux Meadows. What begun as a small-scale study, intended to examine the ‘palaeoecological footprint’ of Norse the peoples who once lived at the site, developed into a broader and longer-term project when our team identified a previously unknown cultural layer buried in a bog at the site.

My three-months visit as an International Visiting Researcher at WiVA coincides with the final year of the research project entitled Biocultural and Archaeological Legacies at L’Anse aux Meadows, which I am co-leading with Paul Ledger and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The research environment and multidisciplinary expertise and interests of the WiVA community is the ideal place where to share findings from this work, exchange ideas, and receive feedback and advice on how to approach the heritage and cultural landscapes of L’Anse aux Meadows. The site, which sits at the westernmost reaches of the Viking diaspora, represents the earliest archaeological evidence for a European presence on lands that are and have long been homes to First Nations, Paleo-Inuit and Inuit.

During my time in Uppsala, I have given a public lecture at Gamla Uppsala Museum. I will also be delivering a workshop inviting WiVA colleagues to help us ‘dig deeper’ into the field records (stratigraphic profiles, Harris matrices, maps and photographs) we have generated thus far from our peatland excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows. Lectures, seminars and discussions with colleagues, as well as site and museum visits in Sweden, Norway, northern Germany and Denmark, have greatly deepened my understanding of the lives and homelands of the peoples who voyaged across the North Atlantic all the way to northern Newfoundland about a millennium ago, and it is my hope to keep learning and nurturing these collaborations.