Amira Bennison’s main project is called, ‘Rewriting the Marinid Age in Morocco’. The Marinids were a late medieval dynasty who ruled the western Maghrib for two centuries. They shared much with the Nasrids who ruled Granada in the same period, especially in terms of their political and material culture. However, they have not enjoyed the same scholarly attention. The classic survey of the dynasty was written over 35 years ago and new approaches and sources have come to light. Professor Bennison’s aim is to use this fresh array of sources and scholarship to rethink this period, which was something of a golden age in some respects, despite the devastation of the Black Death. It was also a time of global reorientations triggered by the Crusades, the Mongol Conquests, and the first tentative European steps towards the circumnavigation of Africa and the discovery of the New World, which impacted upon the Marinid sultanate in various ways.

Amira Bennison will be a Fellow at SCAS during the spring of 2027.

While a Fellow at SCAS, Ben Raffield will work to complete a book manuscript focusing on slavery in Viking-Age Scandinavia and the wider early medieval world. Grounded primarily in the study of archaeological evidence, the book mobilises an interdisciplinary approach that contextualises the discussion of material culture with a range of textual and scientific data. The study will trace the life course of captive and enslaved peoples, from birth into hereditary slaving systems or their abduction by viking raiders, through processes of transportation, sale, and exploitation, and ultimately to death or manumission. In charting these trajectories, the book will also situate the Scandinavian slaving practices within their wider political, social, and cultural context.

Ben Raffield will be at SCAS as a Fellow during the academic year 2026–27.

Victor Lund Shammas’s project, “Punishment in Transition: From Nordic Penal Exceptionalism to the Californian Carceral Turnaround”, draws on over a decade of sociological research into prison conditions and the politics of punishment in two exceptional cases situated on opposite ends of the carceral spectrum: Norway and California. Norway and the wider Nordics have long been seen as sites of humane, rehabilitation-oriented punishment, while California came to embody an ethos of punitiveness through tough-on-crime measures, including “three-strikes” laws, and law-and-order rhetoric and policy. But in recent years, these trajectories have undergone change. California’s prison population has been halved and the state has turned to the Nordics for inspiration on how to reform criminal justice. Meanwhile, the Nordic countries face growing calls for harsher sentencing and a weakening of the welfarist foundations that long sustained penal moderation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Norwegian prison system and on California parole hearings, and engaging with the political economy of punishment and Bourdieusian field theory, the book asks what impels societies to cycle between rehabilitation and retribution — and what it would mean to “punish better.”

Victor Lund Shammas will spend the spring term of 2027 at the Collegium as a SCAS-Nordic Fellow.