Dr. Kay Boers is a Lecturer in Ancient and Medieval History, employed by the Department of History and Art History in the Faculty of Humanities. He is a board member of the Utrecht Centre for Medieval Studies and affiliated with the . He works on various aspects of Late Antiquity, which includes the reception of classical literature, language, and culture in the Post-Roman World (especially in Hispano-Visigothic Iberia, Early Islam, and Byzantium); the erasure and reuse of architecture and material culture; cities and citizens; and the Late Roman politics of violence and victimhood.
His current research focuses on two tiers:
1) The Global Seventh-Century: investigates the cultural and religious interactions of this period from a comparative and transregional perspective with a heavy emphasis on the relation between (inter)text and community, and the organization of discussions and debates in the wider seventh-century world.
2) Rewriting the City: Cultures of Erasure and Reuse in the Late Roman Empire (150 - 640 CE): scrutinizes the reuse and erasure of different forms of text, material culture and architecture in the Late Roman Empire with a specific emphasis on the relation between material culture and the conceptualization of urban space.
His PhD-thesis , defended in 2024 and financed by the Faculty of Humanities and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), investigates how Christians in seventh century Hispania made use of civic vocabulary to structure heuristic and rhetorical argument, and in particular, explores how Hispano-Visigothic authors and editors used this idiom to think about the relation between subject wellbeing and the exercise of royal and episcopal authority
Out now in full Open Access:
Boers, K., Grose, B., Usherwood, R., and Walker, G. (eds.), Erasure in Late Antiquity. Trivent Medieval: Budapest (2024).