
Dr Ian Wei
B.A.(Manc.), PhD (Bristol)
Current positions
Associate Professor in the History of Intellectual Culture
Department of History (Historical Studies)
Contact
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Research interests
I work on intellectual culture and the social history of ideas in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. My published work chiefly explores the role of intellectuals in medieval society, especially the authority and status of the masters of theology at the University of Paris in the late thirteenth century. I also write about the different ways of knowing developed by learned men and women in various social contexts, and the political and social views that they put forward, especially with regard to money, sex and politics.
Since 2004 I have also co-coordinated a collaborative project entitled ‘Ideas and Universities’ for the Worldwide Universities Network. The aim is both to enrich understanding and to have an impact on contemporary policy-making by looking comparatively at the ways in which ideas have found institutional expression in universities in different cultures and periods. We bring together academics from all disciplines, university managers and policy-makers. We run a programme of international video seminars and international conferences which involve the universities of Bergen, Bristol, Hong Kong, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Leeds, Nanjing, Penn State, Sheffield, Southampton, Sydney, Toronto, Madison Wisconsin, Washington Seattle, York, and Zhejiang. Further details are to be found at Ideas and Universities.
Research supervision
I have supervised a range of MA and PhD dissertations relating to the intellectual, cultural and social history of medieval Europe. Past PhD students have completed theses on theological ideas about pain, representations of space in exempla and chronicles, royal regulation of financial transactions in England, and Bernardus Silverstris. I would welcome research proposals relating to any aspect of the intellectual culture of the middle ages.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Globalising Geographies of Research
Role
Researcher
Description
New research themes under the WUN Global Higher Education and Research (GHEAR) Global Challenge were identified by the Steering Group.Managing organisational unit
School of Geographical SciencesDates
01/02/2012 to 03/02/2012
Publications
Recent publications
10/02/2021Universities, Futures and Temporal Ambiguity
Futures
Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals
Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals
‘Intellectual culture in medieval Paris: academic discourse, marriage and money’
The Making of Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, ca. 1150- 1350
'Medieval Universities and Aspirations to Universal Significance'
The Global University: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives
‘Discovering the Moral Value of Money: Usurious Money and Medieval Academic Discourse in Parisian Quodlibets'
Mediaevalia