Sam Barber

Sam Barber studies the art and architecture of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. His research draws on theories of landscape, space, and materiality to explore the various ways the built environment is shaped by—yet also has a hand in shaping—social and political structures in both the past and the present.

His current book project, The Early Medieval Palace: Architectures of Authority, 300–800 CE, advances a new history of the relationship between secular architecture and political power in the premodern Mediterranean. This study argues that the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire triggered a revolution in how space was conceptualized and organized. Between the sixth and the eighth centuries CE, the sprawling horizontality of the Roman elite house gave way to a new preference for height, the reciprocal visibility of the elevated structure “spatializing” the ruler's authority over the landscape. Sam's other interests include the archaeology of urbanism in Late Antiquity; protest and the material culture of dissent; and intermedial relationships between portable objects and architecture.

Publications

“Distant Echoes: Santa Sofia, Benevento, and Architectural Iconography in the Early Medieval Mediterranean,” Speculum 101, no. 4 (forthcoming 2026).

“Protest and Public Space in Fourth Century Rome”. Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 37, no. 3 (in press, forthcoming 2025).

“Defining Difference or Connecting Spaces? Similarity and Meaning in the Arian Baptistery, Ravenna,” in Place and Space in the Medieval World. Edited by Megan Boulton, Heidi Stoner, and Jane Hawkes. New York: Routledge, 2018.