Walter Pohl


Walter Pohl is an Austrian historian. His area of expertise is the history of the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages. He is a leading member of the Vienna School of History.

Biography

Pohl is director of the Institut für Mittelalterforschung of the Austrian Academy of Sciences as well as a university professor of history of the Middle Ages and historical subsidiary sciences at the historical-culture-scientific faculty at the University of Vienna. In the year 2004 he was awarded the Wittgenstein-Preis. Since the summer 2002 he is an Austrian representative in the Committee for the Humanities of the European Science Foundation as well as delegates in the general assembly of the ESF.

Research

The main area of research of Pohl include :
He has written many encyclopedia articles in German and English. Walter Pohl is co-founder and editor of the online open-access journal Medieval Worlds.
A protégé of Herwig Wolfram, Pohl is a leading member of the Vienna School of History. However, he has a "much more fluid" approach on the issues than Wolfram or the latters mentor :de:Reinhard Wenskus|Reinhard Wenskus. Pohl's theories are "profoundly influenced" by sociology, the philosophy of language and critical theory. Pohl contends, in agreement with many other historians, that the Germanic peoples had no institutions or values of their own, and that they made no contribution to the emergence of Medieval Europe. These views have been criticized for example by Wolf Liebeschuetz as "extraordinarily one-sided" and a form of ideological "dogmatism" evincing "a closed mind".