About Me
Bonnie Effros has been Professor and Head of the History Department at UBC since January 2022. Prior to this she was Professor of European History and the Chaddock Chair in Economic and Social History at the University of Liverpool (2017-2021), where she remains an honorary graduate adviser. Her research and teaching address a number of chronological and thematic fields, including the history of archaeology, antiquarianism, and collecting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; late antique and early medieval history and archaeology; and gender history and archaeology. The main geographic focus of her research is France and its colonial possessions. However, her teaching addresses topics related to northwestern Europe and the lands surrounding the Mediterranean basin in both the early Middle Ages and the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Before Liverpool, Prof. Effros taught at the University of Florida, where she had an appointment in the History Department and served as the inaugural Rothman Chair and Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (CHPS) (2009-2017). At the CHPS, she oversaw the Center’s activities, including an annual speaker series and funding competitons for summer grant support for faculty and graduate students in the humanities, lecture series and workshops, library resources, community projects, and team-teaching in the humanities. In 2017, she successfully submitted a grant application to the Mellon for "Intersections: Animating Conversations in the Humanities" to support undergraduate core teaching in the humanities at the University of Florida. She also helped the Humanities Center initiate an annual week-long summer humanities program for high school students in Florida, "Humanities and the Sunshine State", with the support of the Florida Humanities Council, the Center for Precollegiate Education and Teaching, and the College of Liberal Arts and Science. Professor Effros previously taught at the University of Alberta, where she held an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of History and Classics, at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville in the Department of Historical Studies, and at Binghamton University, where she served as chair of the Department of History.
Professor Effros earned her Ph.D. in history at UCLA (1994), where she specialized in the European Middle Ages. Her dissertation, based on written and archaeological evidence for burial rites in Merovingian Gaul, offered fertile ground for her first two books: Caring for Body and Soul: Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World (Penn State University Press 2002) and Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages (University of California Press 2003). Her abiding interest in ritual practice and gender thereafter formed the basis for a series of essays on early medieval feasting and fasting published as Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul (Palgrave 2002). This research enabled her to explore pagan-Christian interactions, female and clerical ascetic practice, food rites associated with burial custom, and dietary discussions in the post-Roman West. Her work has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals: Antiquity, Archeologia Medievale, Archéologie médiévale, British Journal of the History of Science, Early Medieval Europe, Journal of the History of Collections, Journal of Women's History, Medieval Worlds: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Studies, MVSE, Northern History, Quaestiones Medii Aevi Novae, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, Speculum, and Viator. She has also published chapters in the Transformation of the Roman World series (published by E. J. Brill), the supplementary series of the Reallexikon für Altertumskunde (published by Walter de Gruyter), the series Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters (published by the Austrian Academy), the Actes des Journées internationales d'Archéologie mérovingienne (published by the Association francaise d'archéologie mérovingienne) and MittelalterStudien (published by the Institut zur interdisziplinären Erforschung des Mittelalters und seines Nachwirkens at Universität Paderborn), and a variety of other edited collections.
In the last two decades, Professor Effros has published in a second research field of nineteenth-century studies, and particularly in the history of archaeology. In Uncovering the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830-1914 (Oxford, 2012), she links growing interest in the Merovingian past to the discovery of long-forgotten cemeteries uncovered during the course of the industrial revolution in France. These discoveries of “Germanic warriors” pushed the French to reconsider their national origins which could no longer be linked exclusively to the ancient Gauls. In this work, she also examines the impact of the formation of the discipline of archaeology on the collection and interpretation of material artifacts. In her subsequent book entitled Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and the Rediscovery of Roman North Africa (Cornell University Press, August 2018), which was winner of the French Colonial Historical Society's 2019 Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize recognizing the best book dealing with the French colonial experience since 1815, she documented how, in the course of the French invasion and subsequent “pacification” of the region that became Algeria, the armée d’Afrique confiscated homes, land, and mosques from the indigenous population and massacred tribes that resisted French domination. Along with the normalization of violence against civilian inhabitants, classical monuments fared badly, being reused as fortifications or destroyed as materiel for building French barracks, roads, and hospitals. This book examines the contributions of nineteenth-century officers, who, raised on classical accounts of warfare and often trained as cartographers, developed interest in the Roman remains they encountered throughout Algeria. Linking archaeological studies of the Roman past to French narratives of the Algerian occupation, the work examines how Roman archaeology helped foster a new identity for military and civilian settlers and examines the close entanglement of classical studies with politics in colonial and metropolitan France.Prof. Effros continues to work on North Africa, now focusing on Christian archaeology and relic translations in Algiers, Annaba, and Carthage from the late 1830s. For the period from the 1870s onward, she has used the rich archives of the Société des missionaires d’Afrique (Rome) to understand better the excavations of Alfred-Louis Delattre (d. 1932) who excavated Christian and Punic remains in Carthage for nearly fifty years.
Professor Effros’ current monograph project investigates the career of Père Camille de la Croix (d. 1911), a Jesuit archaeologist of Belgian nationality who was active in Poitiers (and Poitou more generally) in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. She is particularly interested in his excavations of the Hypogée des Dunes and the baptistery Saint-Jean in Poitiers, and their contribution to a contested discourse on France’s early Christian past. This was deeply entwined with ultramontane controversies of the period. This book will address the divisiveness of historical and archaeological research in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the impact of the First Vatican Council and virulent antisemitism on the publications of clerical scholars in this period. It puts medieval archaeological and hagiographical research conducted in southwestern France in its historical context and demonstrates how Christian archaeology helped promote problematic claims for the conversion of France to Christianity in the first century. Related to this project, supported by a SSHRC Insight Development grant, she is publishing several articles on the exportation of catacomb martyrs in wax reliquaries from Rome to France and North Africa in the nineteenth century. Since 2020, Prof. Effros has also conducted research on the fascinating career and collections of the Liverpool silversmith and jeweler, Joseph Mayer (d. 1886), whose purchases included the eighteenth-century collection of Rev. Faussett of Anglo-Saxon-period antiquities from Kent. As one of the co-founders of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Mayer made foundational contributions to cultural and intellectual life in the city of Liverpool. His donation of his very important and varied collections (including everything from Egyptian antiquities to Wedgwood pottery) to the Corporation of Liverpool in 1867 made the city’s museum one of the richest collections in nineteenth-century Britain. Today his former holdings are part of the permanent collections of Liverpool’s World Museum, the Walker Art Gallery, and the Museum of Liverpool.
Among other awards, Prof. Effros has received an Insight Development grant from the Social Science Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) (2023-2025), research grants from the Center for Advanced Studies “Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages” at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (2022 and 2024), a membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2013-2014), the Sylvan C. Coleman and Pamela Coleman Memorial Fund Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2001-2002), the Berkshire Summer Fellowship at the Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study) (1998), a Camargo Foundation Fellowship in Cassis, France (Fall 1997), the Franklin Research Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society (2004 and 2019), as well as grants and/or invitations from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Munich, the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz, the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna, and, most recently, the Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale at the Université de Poitiers. During past years she has served as a sponsored lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America, as a member of the Breasted Prize Committee of the American Historical Association, and as an elected Councillor of the Medieval Academy of America (2011-2014; 2023-2026).
Professor Effros is currently a book review editor on the editorial board of the journal Studies in Late Antiquity. In addition, she recently co-edited (with Professor Isabel Moreira, University of Utah) the Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World (Oxford 2019), which involved 45 contributors from four continents. Together with Professor Guolong Lai (University of Florida), she co-edited a collected volume Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology: Vocabulary, Symbols and Legacy (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2018), which was the fruit of an international workshop held at the University of Florida from 8-11 January 2015 with support of the ACLS/Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Comparative Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society Program and the Rothman Endowment of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. She also serves as the series editor of the Brill Series on the Early Middle Ages, a continuation of the Transformation of the Roman World series published by E.J. Brill in the Netherlands.
