Alice Rio

Alice Rio is a French historian of early medieval Europe with particular interests in legal culture and slavery in Francia. A former professor at King's College London, Rio has held the Chichele Chair in Medieval History at the University of Oxford since October 2025. She is currently co-editor, with Matthew Kelly, of the journal Past & Present.

Early life and education Rio was born and raised in Paris. Her doctoral thesis was entitled Frankish legal formularies, c. 500–1000 and completed in 2006.

Academic career After earning her doctorate Rio held a junior research fellowship at New College, Oxford and a fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. In 2009 she returned to King's College London as a lecturer in medieval European history. She previously served as the journal's publications editor.

In October 2025, Rio took up the Chichele Chair in Medieval History at the University of Oxford and a fellowship of All Souls College in succession to Julia M. H. Smith.

Research Rio's first research interest was in early medieval legal culture, reflected in her first monograph which examined the "lively, eclectic textual community" visible in the handbooks of Frankish notaries.

Rio built upon this focus on slavery in her second monograph, Slavery after Rome, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Her goal was to "move away from the “transition from slavery to serfdom” narrative which dominated the literature" and identify the complexities of slavery and unfreedom as markers defining particular experiences.

Rio's current research project is a trade book exploring early medieval European history through the lens of women travellers as "bearers of a minority culture".

Media work In 2019, Rio and Alice Taylor, a fellow medieval historian at King's College London, began hosting the podcast Medieval History for Fun and Profit, described as covering "everything you’ve always wanted to know about the middle ages but were afraid to ask".

Honours and awards In 2008, Rio won the Royal Historical Society's Early Career Article Prize for her article 'Freedom and Unfreedom in Early Medieval Francia: the Evidence of the Legal Formulae' (2007). In 2009, she won the society's Gladstone Book Prize for her monograph Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages: Frankish Formulae, c. 500–1000. In 2010, Rio was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for the international impact of her research. In January 2012, she was awarded a £666,000 Arts and Humanities Research Council grant as principal investigator of the three-year project 'The Making of Charlemagne's Europe (768–814)'.