Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History emeritus at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College, and will be Director of the British School at Rome, January through July 2021. He is the author of numerous books on medieval rural and urban Italy as well as highly acclaimed comparative histories of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, most recentlyMedieval Europe (Yale UP, 2016). He is currently writing a comparative history of the Mediterranean ca. 950–1180, synthesizing textual and archeological evidence for long-distance and regional exchange.