Patrick J. Geary (born 1948) is, effective January 1, 2012, Professor of Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at UCLA. He was educated at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and received his Ph.D in Medieval Studies from Yale in 1974, where he studied with Robert S. Lopez and Jaroslav Pelikan. Geary's scholarship has made significant contributions to a number of areas of medieval social and cultural history, including the cult of relics, literacy and social memory, conflict and dispute resolution, and the formation of ethnic identity. He has also published and spoken frequently on the development of medieval history as an academic discipline in Europe and the United States.
Geary has taught at Princeton University, the University of Florida, and Notre Dame University, and has held visiting professorships at several European universities. He recently served as the president of the Medieval Academy of America and was previously director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Center for Medieval Studies at Notre Dame University.
Most recently, Geary has directed a multi-year, international collaborative project, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to produce a computerized image and object database of the famous Plan of St. Gall, a ninth-century Carolingian schematic drawing of a monastic complex.[1]
Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978. Revised edition 1991. French translation Le Vol des Reliques. Aubier, 1993. Italian translation Coltura e Pensiero 2000.
"L'humiliation des saints," Annales, E.S.C. 34 (1979), pp. 27‑42
"Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle Ages," Mitteilungen der anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien vol. 113 (1983) pp. 15‑26
Aristocracy in Provence: The Rhone Basin at the Dawn of the Carolingian Age. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia; Anton Hiersemann Verlag, Stuttgart, 1985.
"Vivre en conflit dans une France sans état: Typologie des mécanismes de règlement des conflits (1050‑1200)," Annales, E.S.C. (1985) pp. 1107‑1133.
Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World, Oxford University Press, New York, 1988. French translation, Le monde Mérovingien Flammarion, 1989. German Translation, Die Merowinger, C. H. Beck, 1996 Korean Translation Vistabooks, 1999.
Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the end of the first Millennium, Princeton University Press, 1994. French translation Aubier 1996
Medieval Germany in America. German Historical Institute Annual Lecture 1995 (German Historical Institute, 1996).
The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. German Translation: Europäische Völker im frühen Mittelalter. Zur Legende vom Werden der Nationen. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002.
Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Historians as Public Intellectuals. Southampton: University of Southampton, Centre for Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 2007 (The Reuter Lecture 2006).
Courtney M. Booker, "Interview with Patrick J. Geary," Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 29 (1998), pp. 1–18.