Prof. Dr. Matthias M. Tischler MAE

Prof. Dr. Matthias M. Tischler MAE (ICREA/UAB, Barcelona/Bellaterra)

(PhD Heidelberg 1998; habilitation Dresden 2008) studied medieval and modern history, auxiliary sciences, classical and medieval Latin and Romance languages at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munich (1989–95) and Islam at the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology at Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt am Main (2003–08). He has been an ICREA Senior research professor in Barcelona since 2017. In the academic year 2014/15 he was Visiting Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, in spring 2016 he was Visiting Scholar at the Medieval Institute of Notre Dame University, USA, and in spring 2019 he was Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. In January 2020, he was a senior fellow at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. He has been a member of the Academia Europaea since 1 September 2020 (member n^o 5397).

M. M. Tischler is a leading expert in the study of Carolingian text and manuscript culture and medieval interreligious dialogue literature, but has also acquired an international reputation for his studies on the Augustinian canons of St. Victor in Paris in the intellectual world of scholasticism of the central and late Middle Ages. In recent years, he has begun to bring together these different lines of research on knowledge transfer and to demonstrate the impact of the cultural and social transformation brought about by this, especially in the peripheries of Europe.

All his work is based on the in-depth codicological and palaeographical study of manuscripts and contributes to the creation of a transcultural palaeography of the Middle Ages.

From 2015 to 2019, he co-directed, with Walter Pohl, the FWF project “Bible and Historiography in Transcultural Iberian Societies, Eighth to Twelfth Centuries” at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. From 2016 to 2019, he directed the project “From Carolingian Periphery to European Central Region: The Written Genesis of Catalonia” at the Institute of Medieval Studies of the Autonomous University of Barcelona as part of the HERA project “After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Crisis of the Carolingian World, c. 900-c.1050 (UNUP)”. Since 2020, he and Walter Pohl have been leading the bilateral project “Carolingian Culture in Septimania and Catalonia: The Transformation of a Multi-Ethnic Middle Ground of the Euro-Mediterranean World”.