Reed Johnston Morgan became a Ph.D. candidate in the Harvard History Department in the fall of 2019, with the generous support of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean (MHAAM)’s Graduate Fellowship.  He received his B.A. in Archaeological Studies from Yale University, and received a Paul Mellon Fellowship to study for two years at Clare College, Cambridge, where he obtained M.Phil. degrees in Archaeological Research and Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. 

Reed is interested in textual, archaeological, and scientific approaches to the history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. His research focuses on environment, migration, and community (religious, political, and ethnic) in the late antique Western Mediterranean, especially at the political frontiers of Iberia, North Africa, and Sardinia in the period 400-750.  He is organizing a paleogenomic study of population dynamics in ancient North Africa, in collaboration with the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rome.  His work in environmental and climate history has involved temperature reconstruction using molluscan isotopes and the study of ancient environmental DNA in glacial ice cores.  He has worked on excavations in Scotland, Italy, Greece, and Egypt.  He is also interested in the development of Christian doctrine, and currently planning a project on the Second Origenist Controversy.