Dr. Salome Egloff (she/her)

Salome Egloff has been working as a visiting assistant professor at the Chair of Medieval History since September 2025. Previously, she was employed as an SNF scholarship holder and then as a senior assistant at the History Department of the University of Zurich. There, she received her doctorate in 2024 with a thesis entitled “Excluded from the commons. Legal inequality and collective property regimes in the Swiss Confederation, 1500-1800.” 
Between 2010 and 2018, she studied general history, art history, and Latin language and literature in Zurich.

Her research focuses on medieval and early modern economic, social, and legal history. In her dissertation project, she analyzed early modern rural cooperatives in the Swiss Confederation and examined the family and communal systems used to manage collective property. In the course of the early modern period, these communities developed differentiated systems of legal categorization in which legal categories were linked to graded rights of collective ownership. The thesis argues that this led to a deepening of economic and social contrasts within peasant communities.

In her postdoctoral research project, she examines the relationships between lords and peasant communities in late medieval France. She explores forms of interaction between cooperation and resistance. Peasant actors brought petitions and complaints before their lords, but at the same time exercised delegated rights of rule at lower levels of hierarchy. Particular attention is paid to the mobilization of legal concepts such as the universitas and legal practices such as the use of courts and notaries by peasant actors. Through the analysis of account books, tax registers, and tax records, the legal perspective is combined with an economic perspective in order to shed new light on the dynamics of rural societies in the late Middle Ages.