Dr Elina Screen

BA, MPhil, PhD (Cambridge)

After completing my PhD on ninth-century Francia at the University of Cambridge, I worked in the Department of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge as a research associate on the Medieval European Coinage project and the Anglo-Saxon Coins in Norway project. This triggered my enduring fascination with coins and their potential to illuminate the past. Subsequently I have held fixed-term lectureships in medieval history, including at the University of St Andrews; Birkbeck, University of London; and at the University of Oxford, most recently at St Catherine's College and Trinity College. 

I teach the medieval British and European and World History papers, c. 300–1300; the Mongols Optional Subject; Approaches to History: Archaeology; and Disciplines of History.

My research explores the experience of participating in economic and political networks in the early middle ages. I use written and coinage evidence to explore questions including economic practices, concepts of value and regional boundaries in Francia, the Viking world and England c. 750–1100. I am currently completing my monograph on the Carolingian emperor Lothar I (795–855), Lothar I and the Remaking of Francia, 843–855, which draws in particular on the royal charters. I also work on the movement of coins within Anglo-Saxon England, Scandinavia and the Baltic as evidence for trade links and cultural transfers. I am increasingly engaged by themes in global history in my research and teaching.

‘Female moneyers revisited: gender and coin production in late Anglo-Saxon England’, in M. Allen, R. Naismith and H. Pagan (eds), Interpreting Early Medieval Coinage: Studies in Honour of Stewart Lyon (London, 2022), 149–58.

‘Carolingian fathers and sons in Italy, 822-55’, in C. Gantner and W. Pohl (eds.), After Charlemagne: Carolingian Italy and its Rulers (Cambridge, 2021), 148–63.

‘Coins as an indicator of communications between the British Isles and Scandinavia in the Viking age’, in J. Gruszczyński, M. Jankowiak and J. Shepard (eds.), Viking-Age Trade: Slaves, Silver and Gotland (Abingdon, 2021), 377–95.

‘Coining it? Carolingian rulers and the Frankish coinage, c.750-900’, History Compass (8 August 2019), doi: 10.1111/hic3.12591

I am President of the British Numismatic Society and General Editor of the Medieval European Coinage Project.