Professor at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.
Hans Jacob Orning, the Norwegian PI in the ELITES project, is Professor at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo. As a member of the ELITES team, he will compare various aspects of Polish and Norwegian political culture in the high Middle Ages.
Orning completed his PhD (2004) in medieval history at the University of Oslo. His PhD thesis was published as Unpredictability and Presence: Norwegian Kingship in the High Middle Ages (Leiden 2008). His work which used legal anthropological perspectives contributed to a change in the approach to medieval political history in Norway by downplaying the state formation .
Since 2013 he has mainly worked within a project on civil war in the Middle Ages and modern times (The Nordic Civil Wars in a Comparative Perspective), funded by the Research Council of Norway and the Center for Advanced Research, with Jón Viðar Sigurðsson as co-leader. Together with political scientist Øyvind Østerud, he wrote the book War without State – wars in the Middle Ages and today (Dreyer 2020, in Norwegian, forthcoming in English). He is co-editor of three volumes of Nordic Elites in Transformation, published with Routledge 2019-20.
Orning has also written the monograph The Reality of the Fantastic: The Magical, Geopolitical and Social Universe of Late Medieval Saga Manuscripts (Southern Danish Publishers, 2017), using New Philological methods on late medieval manuscripts.
In 2020-22, he will work on a project called Scandinavian Political Communities in the Middle Ages – European, or Something Different? which is funded by Peder Sather Grant. He will co-write a book with Geoffrey Koziol from the University of Berkeley.