Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor, University of Arizona

Expert Bio

Paul Milliman is an Associate Professor in the History Department and a Faculty Affiliate in the Religious Studies Program and the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona.  His research interests include food and games in early world history, the use of historically-based computer games to teach history, and the topic on which he will work at the Kennan Institute, medieval and early modern western European perceptions of eastern Europe and Eurasia.  In the spring he was an Associate at the Title VIII-funded Virtual Open Research Lab at the Russian, East European, Eurasian Center (REEEC) at the University of Illinois, where he worked on the same project.

Expertise

• History
• Society and Culture
• Europe
• Russia and Eurasia

Wilson Center Project

Medieval and Early Modern Perceptions of Eastern Europe

Project Summary

In 1994 Larry Wolff argued that the western idea of eastern Europe first developed not during the Cold War but rather during the Enlightenment. A decade later a large part of eastern Europe joined the EU, which played a role in the Brexit vote of 2016. Yet, this western European view of eastern Europe as a place that is different did not develop only because of the expansion of the EU, the Cold War, or the Enlightenment. Europe’s division actually has a much deeper history, an analysis of which is important in understanding current events.

Major Publications

• 'The Slippery Memory of Men': The Place of Pomerania in the Medieval Kingdom of Poland (Leiden: Brill, 2013)
• "Ludus Scaccarii: Games and Governance in Twelfth-Century England," in Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, ed. Daniel E. O'Sullivan (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 63-86
• “'Und gras vor spise zeren’: Migration, Fermentation, and the Map of Civilization in the Baltic Crusades.” In Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe, edited by Christian Raffensperger. New York: Routledge, forthcoming

Previous Terms

Short-Term Scholar, "Lubrica hominum memoria: The Social Memory of Pomerania and Prussia in the Restoration of the Kingdom of Poland," August 1, 2009 - November 1, 2009, Global Europe Program.