Lance Pursey

Lance Pursey is a social historian investigating the role of cities in the empires of the medieval Eastern Eurasian steppe. His work brings textual, epigraphical, and archaeological sources into dialogue to investigate themes such as geography, mobility, identities, and the material conditions of the 10th to 13th century North China - Mongolia frontier zone under the Kitan Liao (907-1125CE) and Jurchen Jin (1115-1234CE) empires.

Dr Pursey obtained his PhD in History from the University of Birmingham in 2020 with funding from the AHRC and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. Before joining the Koch History Centre he has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Birmingham, University of Aberdeen, Waseda University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Academia Sinica, and has worked on projects funded by the AHRC, JSPS, ERC, and the British Library Endangered Archives Programme.

Dr Pursey joins the Koch History Centre to interrogate the material realities and political rhetoric of conditions of scarcity for those living on the eleventh century Mongolian plateau. He focuses particularly on dissenting opinions on frontier policy by ministers in the Kitan Liao government, who claimed that the Liao’s Mongolian frontier was overextended and the expansion of settlements and fortifications was unsustainable.

Guided by his own observations from several fieldwork seasons (2022-2025) at sites along the Kherlen river, Dr Pursey tests these claims and what they reveal about how the exchange of materials, the flow of information, and the projection of authority are sustained across vast distances and difficult terrain, articulating the strained connections between the frontier and the heartland of an empire than spanned the steppe and the sown.