Rate My Professor Erin Thomas Dailey

Dr Erin Thomas Dailey is Associate Professor of Late Antique and Early Medieval History in the School of History, Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester, where he also serves as Co-Director of the Leicester Medieval Research Centre. Dailey completed his PhD at the University of Leeds in 2011 with a thesis entitled Studies in Sixth-Century Gaul, as part of the ‘Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages’ project that connected researchers across European universities examining how historical writers shaped past identities. He holds a Master of Research degree from the University of Leeds on ‘Roman Influence in Early Anglo-Saxon Britain’. Following postgraduate studies, Dailey worked in academic publishing before taking up a lectureship at the University of Leicester and advancing to his current associate professorship.

Dailey's research centres on Late Antiquity (c. 200–750 AD), with specializations in gender and social hierarchy, ancient and medieval slavery, the Merovingian kingdoms, and early medieval Britain, including the Islamic world. His interests encompass the social processes accompanying the end of the Roman Empire—shifting from questions of ‘why’ to ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘did’ it fall—the experiences of women navigating fluctuating statuses and cultural frontiers, such as Thuringian princess Radegund who became Frankish queen and holy nun, and historical slaveholding practices, particularly attitudes toward the sexual exploitation of enslaved people. As Principal Investigator, Dailey leads the DoSSE project, a 60-month initiative funded by a €1,994,231 European Research Council Starting Grant under the Horizon 2020 programme, directing postdoctoral and doctoral researchers to study domestic slavery and sexual exploitation in households across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East from Constantine to c. AD 900/AH 287, spanning Latin Christendom, Byzantium, and the early Islamic Caliphate. Key publications are the monographs Queens, Consorts, Concubines: Gregory of Tours and Women of the Merovingian Elite (Brill, 2015) and Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen (Oxford University Press, 2023), alongside co-editing Portraits of Medieval Europe, 800–1400.