Dr Aubrey Steingraber - Mark Ormrod CMS PhD Prize Winner

On December 13th 2023, Dr Aubrey Steingraber was announced as the winner of the York Centre for Medieval Studies' 2022 Mark Ormrod PhD Prize, awarded for the best thesis on a medieval topic from that year. Aubrey's thesis was entitled Landscape and the Making of the Medieval Anglo-Scottish Border: Power, Place, and Perspective c. 1200-1500, and was supervised by Dr Aleks McClain (who also received the award for her in absentia!) Aubrey’s thesis undertook an archaeological exploration of the Anglo-Scottish border in the later Middle Ages, which had been a frequent subject of research by historians, but was much neglected from an archaeological standpoint apart from quite narrow studies of fortifications in the border region. Her research therefore presents the first wide-ranging materially-focused study of the border, and has compiled for the first time a diverse and comprehensive georeferenced database of built, landscape, and artefactual evidence for both the English and Scottish sides of the study region. The thesis was particularly groundbreaking in its methodological and theoretical approaches, combining GIS mapping and analytical techniques with an interpretative framework of border theory and the characteristics of historic and modern borderland territories and communities. Aubrey's research has challenged long-standing interpretations about the nature of the Anglo-Scottish border, its function, how it changed over time, and how it was perceived and experienced by different social groups, and has explored new conceptualisations of the border landscape: the defense-scape, the legal-scape, and ‘alternative’ social and emotional geographies of the region. After finishing her thesis Aubrey went on to work for Headland Archaeology as a GIS Supervisor, and has recently moved to a role as a GIS Specialist Technician for the WorldPop Research Group at the University of Southampton.