Rate My Professor Thomas Wittkamp

Thomas Wittkamp is a scientific assistant at the Chair for the History of the European Middle Ages and its Cultures at Universität Passau, where he has been employed since 2024. He holds a Magister Artium degree from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, obtained in 2009 after studies in Historical Anthropology as well as Modern and Contemporary History. Earlier, he studied Biology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum from 2003 to 2004. His professional career includes roles as a scholarship holder and research assistant in the DFG Graduate School 1288 “Friends, Patrons, Loyalists” at Freiburg from 2009 to 2012, followed by positions as tutor, scientific coordinator, and project manager in teacher education and study program development at the same university until 2018. After parental leave, he served as a research assistant at the University of Oldenburg from 2019 to 2022 and contributed to study program development at Universität Passau from 2022 to 2024.

Thomas Wittkamp’s research centers on vassals and vassalage in narrative sources of the Carolingian period, examined from a historical-anthropological perspective, with particular attention to semantics, rituals, patronage, emotions, loyalties, and hierarchies in sources such as the Gesta Karoli Magni of Notker the Stammerer and accounts involving figures like Tassilo III. His key publications include the 2021 article “Das Schicksal Hugos, Sohn Lothars II., und die Normannenpolitik der Lotharlinie” in a volume on Lotharingia and “Warriors and warlike kings in the Gesta Karoli of Notker the Stammerer” in Early Medieval Militarisation. He has delivered numerous lectures at conferences and workshops on topics including benefices, emotions in lord-vassal relations, and militarisation in the early Middle Ages. His work contributes to understandings of political and social structures in the Carolingian era through detailed source analysis and interdisciplinary approaches.