Tegan N. Currie
Email: tc224@st-andrews.ac.uk
In 2010 I received my Master of Arts (Honours) degree in Mediaeval History from the University of St. Andrews. My final year of undergraduate was focused on examining the depictions of Viking Age governing systems in two works: Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum and Rimbert’s Vita Anskarii. In 2011 I received my Master of Letters (M.Litt.) degree in Mediaeval History from the University of St. Andrews. My M.Litt. thesis was a study of how gaming pieces and gaming boards were used in Viking Age Scandinavian burials. I began my PhD research at the University of St. Andrews in 2011 with Dr. Alex Woolf. My main interests currently are in the practices and ideas that surround death in Viking Age and Mediaeval Scandinavia. I am interested in looking at the practices that were involved in the death and burial of Scandinavians, as represented in the archaeological record. Equally, I am looking at the way those practices and ideas have changed and are then represented in the later Old Norse-Icelandic saga literature. At the moment I am particularly interested in ideas of the draugr, the influence of Christian ideas of resurrection, death and the representation of death during the conversion of Iceland, as well as the general practices and subsequent representations of burials.
Thesis title: 'The practices, perceptions and representations of death, burial and the dead in the archaeology of Scandinavia and in the Sagas'
Name of supervisor: Dr. Alex Woolf
Academic Papers:
- 'Pagan Burials in Christian lands: A Reassessment of Two Viking Burial sites In England and their Connections with the Great Army of c. 865', presented at St. Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies Postgraduate Seminar on 13th April 2011; and at Pagans, Heretics and Outcasts: The ‘Other’ in the Middle Ages University of St Andrews and University of Oxford Exchange Conference, Oxford, 28 May 2011.
Other:
Co-founder and organizer of Pagans, Heretics and Outcasts: The ‘Other’ in the Middle Ages University of St Andrews and University of Oxford Exchange Conference, Oxford, 28 May 2011; with a second instalment in the works for 2012 in St. Andrews.