A History at the Smallest Scale

Christensen has always been drawn to the smallest possible scale, to how people actually lived, their relationships, their labor, and their daily negotiations with conditions imposed on them. The women at the center of her dissertation, Intimate Histories of Enslaved Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400–1200, are some of the hardest possible subjects for that kind of history. 

"I have always been more interested in histories of the smallest possible scale than in grand narratives," Christensen reflects. "I'm glad to have the opportunity to share compelling stories about the lives of these women who are often overlooked in the historical record of medieval Europe and gratified that these stories have resonated with a wide range of readers from other fields."

The women she includes in her writing are largely nameless, left no writings of their own, and appear in sources almost exclusively authored by the free men who owned or traded them. Yet Christensen found them: in a saint's life from fifth-century Ireland, in a Norse saga set in Viking-Age Iceland, in an Arabic traveler's account of a Rus' funeral on the Volga, in a Byzantine visionary text from Constantinople.

A Decade in the Making

Christensen's path to her dissertation began while she was an undergraduate at Brown. A course on the Viking Age with Professor Jonathan Conant first drew her toward questions of gender and slavery, questions she would pursue for her master's thesis at the University of Cambridge.  Those questions eventually brought her back to Brown for her doctoral degree, with Conant as her primary advisor, closing a loop that spans nearly a decade.

Her research was funded by a Fulbright-Mach Fellowship to Austria and a Peter Green Doctoral Scholarship from the department of History at Brown. Her article, Human-Animal Entanglements in the Early Medieval European Slave Trade: Re-Reading the Raffelstetten Customs Regulations, published in Early Medieval Europe, won that journal's First Publication Prize in 2025.

Centering Women in the Slave Trade's "Northern Arc"

The history of early medieval slavery has grown substantially as a scholarly field over the past generation. But the scholarship has focused almost entirely on enslaved men and boys, whose experiences are somewhat better documented in the surviving record. Christensen argues that enslaved women were not marginal figures. They were central to the construction of ideas about sexual propriety, kinship, class, and belonging across medieval societies. Their importance, she argues, has been systematically obscured.

Her dissertation traces what scholars call the Northern Arc of trade, stretching from Iceland and Ireland in the west, through the Baltic and the riverine waterways of the Eurasian Steppe, and on to the Byzantine and Islamic empires of southeastern Europe and western Asia.

"Her study centers the lived experiences — both real and imagined — of women and girls who were enslaved, transported, and sold along this arc," says Jonathan Conant, Associate Professor of History and Classics and Director of Medieval Studies at Brown, who served as Christensen's primary advisor.

Four Lives, Four Chapters

The dissertation is structured around the lives of four enslaved women to reveal the hidden human realities of the medieval world. It begins with Broicsech, the mother of St. Brigid in early Ireland, focusing on the emotional bond between mother and daughter within a restrictive society. Next, the story of Melkorka, an Irish princess captured by Vikings, illustrates the trauma of the slave trade and a stark social divide: while the sons of enslaved women could sometimes achieve high status, the women themselves remained trapped.

The third chapter examines a disturbing account of a ritual execution in tenth-century Eastern Europe, with Christensen uncovering historical biases to recover the "dehumanized" woman's experience. Finally, the dissertation highlights Theodora, an elderly enslaved woman in the Byzantine Empire. Though often dismissed as a fictional device, Sarah argues that Theodora’s story is a rare, vital record of how enslaved women navigated exploitation and motherhood to find their own voices.

A New Methodological Approach

Rather than dismissing fictionalized sources as unreliable, Christensen reads them as "ideologically-inflected and inventive" cultural texts preserving meaningful traces of enslaved women's lives. She calls this approach "intimate history," and develops it by bringing medieval studies into dialogue with Black feminist scholarship,  drawing especially on the work of Saidiya Hartman and Jennifer Morgan. 

"Sarah does not just apply Atlantic methodologies to a different time and place," Conant writes; "she 'thinks with' them, adapting, stretching, and combining them with other methods to fit the radically different and far more silent archive of the early medieval world."

Amy G. Remensnyder, Giancarlo Family Provost's Professor of History, predicts that the book the dissertation becomes "is going to make a big splash and open a whole new field of study."

Teacher, Scholar, and What Comes Next

Beyond her dissertation, Christensen has taught her own undergraduate seminars at both Brown and Wheaton College through the Advanced Teaching Fellowship from her department and a Brown-Wheaton Faculty Fellowship. "Christensen enjoys a well-deserved reputation as an effective, imaginative, and dedicated teacher," says Remensnyder.

Christensen completed her degree in the summer of 2025 and joined Princeton University in August 2025 as a Lecturer in the Writing Program, where she currently teaches a first-year writing seminar called Animal Planet.

Doctoral candidates and graduates, Gray Barber Babbs, Sarah Ferris Christensen, Meg Shieh, and Semilore Sobandewere selected for the Graduate School's Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award. Prizes are awarded at the Doctoral Ceremony on May 24, 2026.