Patrick Hegarty Morrish

I am a Stipendiary Lecturer at Trinity and a DPhil student in Medieval History. My BA is from Oriel College; I left Oxford for a year for a MA in Vienna.

I teach first-year undergraduate tutorials in Medieval History at Trinity and have also taught Finalist papers including Disciplines.

My doctoral project is an environmental history of pastoralism in the mountains of Haute-Provence in the fourteenth century. A first angle of enquiry is how shepherds, swineherds and cowherds interacted with their environment, whether making cheese on the mountain pastures or moving their flocks moving up and down between highland and lowland in summer and winter. The second focuses on the socio-political structure which governed and regulated use of the mountains, and asks whether living within mountain ecologies implied different styles, intensities and scales of government and control to those of neighbouring lowlanders. My research applies these questions to the documents conserved the archives of tiny mountain villages which have survived the vagaries of seven hundred years in boxes in basements and lofts.

I am also interested in contemporary pastoralism, and, as a Research Assistant at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme, I am running a project which analyses the relationship between mobile pastoralists and environmental law. With researchers in Anthropology and Geography, I founded the TORCH-funded Oxford University Pastoralist Collective focused on advocacy for mobile and indigenous people.

Cycling around the Alps has been an important aid to my research, as was spending some time in summer on a Provençal goat farm.

‘Architects in Enjoyment: Fun and Politics in the Swedish Cycling Experience, 1918-39’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 39, 7 (2022): 707-26.

‘Pastoralists, Camels and State-Making: the Banu Sakhr and Glubb Pasha in early twentieth-century Jordan’, forthcoming in Nomadic Peoples, January 2024.