Professor, History
History Honors Faculty Liaison
- PhD, Yale University
- AB, Princeton University, History
Barton is a scholar of the premodern world, with interests in all aspects of medieval culture from the Later Roman Empire in the fourth century through the early sixteenth century. After doing his undergraduate work in History and Medieval Studies at Princeton (AB 1998), and PhD in Medieval History at Yale (2006), he taught for one year at Oberlin College before relocating to the University of San Diego (USD) in 2007, where he currently serves as Professor of Medieval History.
He is an active archival historian who has won a number of fellowships to support his lines of research, including full-year fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (2010-11) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2019-20). He serves on various professional and prize committees within his field and frequently referees article and book manuscript submissions for leading journals and academic presses. He also regularly presents at academic conferences and delivers public lectures in a range of settings and organizes sessions and seminars at domestic and international meetings.
Barton works hard to support Medieval Studies in California, the United States, and throughout the Anglo-American world. In 2008, he co-founded USD's Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, which he has since directed or co-directed, off and on, for many years. He is an elected councilor of the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) and also serves as chair of the MAA’s Mentorship Committee, which seeks to promote graduate-student learning, and is the immediate past president of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain, an organization founded in 1976 that is dedicated to promoting scholarship on premodern Iberia and the western Mediterranean. He is also an Associate of the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies at UCLA, where he has coordinated several major international conferences. He sits on the steering committee of the California Medieval Seminar, which is convoked quarterly at UCLA, and regularly attends its sessions. He is also an active member of the Mediterranean Seminar. Highly collaborative with scholars in Europe and around the world, he is the only non-European member of the External Scientific Committee of the Instituto de Estudos Medievais, at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He serves as an expert panelist for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He currently sits on the Extended Editorial Board of Viator and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies.
Barton strives every day to be a productive and inspirational teacher-scholar and sees it as his mission in life to help the young men and women in his classes see why history is worth exploring and pondering as they sort out the problems of today and aspire to forge a better tomorrow. In his free time, he enjoys beekeeping and gardening with his family on their small hobby farm in north county San Diego. He’s also an avid baker, chef, and coffee aficionado.
Areas of Expertise
Medieval European and Mediterranean history; ecclesiastical and monastic history; history of Catholic theological development with a special interest in the roots of intolerance; historical interactions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims; world history
Scholarly Work
Thus far, Barton has written four monographs (two published, two forthcoming), edited four collaborative volumes, and authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in top journals in the medieval field, including a long essay on the adaptation under Christian rule of Andalusi and Maghrebi share-cropping systems, which won the Bishko Prize from the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS) for the best article by a North American scholar on a medieval Iberian topic (2012).
His first monograph, Contested Treasure: Jews and Authority in the Crown of Aragon (Penn State, 2015, Iberian Encounter and Exchange, 475-1755), explored how different non-royal Christian authorities sought to maintain or harden their administrative control of Jews residing on their lands in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries and thereby challenge the crown's claim that Jews (and Muslims) were its exclusive regalian preserve. It won two major book awards. The Association for Jewish Studies awarded it the 2017 Jordan Schnitzer Award for the best book on Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History and Culture published between 2015 and 2016, and the ASPHS awarded it the 2016 Best First Book Award, which considered all first monographs in English, Spanish, and Portuguese on Iberian history (from ancient to modern) between 2013 and 2015.
His second monograph, Victory’s Shadow: Conquest and Governance in Medieval Catalonia (Cornell University Press, 2019, Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures Series) won the inaugural 2023 Jerome E. Singerman Prize from the MAA and the 2020 Premio del Rey Prize from the American Historical Association and was "Highly Commended" by the prize jury for the Royal Studies Journal and Winchester University Press Biennial Book Prize. It concerned Christian-Muslim interaction along the lower Ebro River valley between the eleventh and later thirteenth centuries. It examines how changing relations between Christian and Muslim principalities culminating in the conquest and integration of Muslim territory engendered significant political shifts and reorganizations that, it argued, were integral to the development and expression of royal authority within the emergent composite monarchy known as the Crown of Aragon. This study not only broke new ground as the first archive-based examination of this process of territorial expansion along this boundary in any language. It also made an important contribution to the ongoing debate among scholars concerning conquest, colonization, and frontier expansion in High Medieval Europe.
His forthcoming third book project, Constructing Christendom: Conquest and Diocese Formation in Medieval Iberia is in production with University of Pennsylvania Press within its The Middle Ages series. It addresses another topic that has received little attention from recent scholarship: the process of organizing diocesan space within conquered territories along Christendom’s peripheries by rulers and church leaders. The product of extensive research among diverse ecclesiastical and monastic archives over many years, the book examines closely how newly restored episcopal sees organized themselves during the consolidation and reorganization of conquered landscapes in competition with neighboring bishoprics. Although its focus is on the comparative analysis of two dioceses in eastern Iberia, the book’s argument applies to a wide range of restoration projects throughout Mediterranean Europe which served as a model for church foundations and diocese-formations further afield as Spain, Portugal, and other European nations colonized Africa, Asia, the Atlantic world and beyond.
His second forthcoming book project, Diocesan Dominion: The Quest for Episcopal Authority in Conquest Iberia is under contract with Penn State University Press for its Iberian Encounter and Exchange, 475-1755. It examines the strategies used by bishops to establish their authority within their restored dioceses on lands captured from Muslim control. Using a wide range of sources from an assortment of state and ecclesiastical archives, the book explores how bishops, cathedral canons, parish rectors, and other clerics sought to assert episcopal rights over three different categories of opponents as they consolidated their dioceses: lay lords, military orders, and monasteries. The book reveals how diocesan leaders, often with explicit papal authorization, deviated from written canonical standards to recover these fractional elements of their claimed entitlements.
Barton has several further book projects in progress:
His fifth monograph project is well underway: Policing Female Bodies: Mixed Sexual Unions in the Premodern Catholic World explores how evolving legal and religious frameworks shaped attitudes toward sexual relations between Christians and non-Christians across the Spanish and Portuguese empires from the 1300s to 1600s. Focusing on the regulation of Christian women’s sexuality, the book traces shifting boundaries of race, religion, and lineage from medieval Iberia to colonial Latin America and Asia. While official discourse increasingly emphasized hereditary impurity and “purity of blood,” quotidian sources—especially Inquisition and court records—reveal that everyday people often defied or reinterpreted these rules. Drawing on newly accessible digital archives and decades of experience in Iberian archives, this project centers popular practice and testimony to reconstruct how ordinary women and men navigated the legal and moral constraints on mixed sexual unions. The book challenges top-down narratives of racialization by uncovering the lived realities of those subjected to, and resisting, the regulation of interfaith and interracial intimacy.
Barton has also been actively conducting archival research in support of another book project, which will be his final focused study relating to the Crown of Aragon. Urban Poverty in the Late Medieval Mediterranean draws on a wide assortment of overlooked paper municipal series from the Catalan city of Tortosa (including treasury registers, account books for public works projects, court cases, and local ordinances) to assess the relationships between elite and average citizens and the indigent poor within the context of the rhythms and patterns of daily life and over the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. His objective is to present a balanced view of urban life and local political dynamics by tracing the activity of a selection of subjects who can arguably represent distinct facets of the city’s diverse community. While the focus is chiefly on Tortosa’s urban (and suburban) environment, the book invokes comparisons with certain neighboring cities and towns in Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragon in order to analyze and contextualize this local case study. His methodology with this project is heavily influenced by Eduardo Grendi’s conception of the “exceptional normal” as applied by Steve Hindle in his work on the village of Chilvers Coton in northeastern Warwickshire in seventeenth-century England.
Barton has edited three volumes of collected essays: Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman (Europa Sacra series no. 22, Brepols Press, 2017), Iberia, the Mediterranean, and the Larger World in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, which appeared as a special volume of Pedralbes 40 (2020) published by the Universitat de Barcelona, and Constructing Iberian Identities, 1000-1700 (Cursor Mundi series no. 42, Brepols Press, 2022). A fourth edited volume Ethno-Religious Interaction in the Premodern Iberian World is in production with Brepols Press (Cursor Mundi volume 44).