Patrick Geary Is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study. He received his PhD from Yale University and has taught at Princeton University, the University of Florida, Notre Dame, and UCLA. For the past twenty-five years he has chaired MA defenses at the Central European University. He is former director of the Notre Dame Medieval Institute and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Among his books are Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages; Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of  the Merovingian World; Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages; Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the end of the first Millennium; The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe; Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary; Writing History: Identity, Conflict and Memory in the Middle Ages; and Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages. He is former President of the Medieval Academy of America and is a fellow of the Medieval Academy and The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and corresponding fellow of the British Academy, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Sciences of Göttingen, the French National Society of Antiquarians, The German Archaeological Institute, and is an honorary member of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research. His research concentrates on Continental history between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Currently he leads an international team of historians, geneticists, and archaeologists studying population structure and mobility between Central Europe and Italy in early Middle Ages through ancient DNA analysis. Together with three European colleagues (Walter Pohl, Johannes Krause, and Tivadar Vida), he is the recent recipient of a 10 million euro grant from the European Research Council to understand a study of population changes in the Danubian region between the fifth and ninth centuries.