Dr. Fazioli is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities (School of Liberal Arts) and the co-Director of the College Honors Program at Mercy. He earned a B.A. in History from Providence College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo (Anthropology / Archaeology). Before joining the Mercy faculty in 2015, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the Honors Program at Medaille College in Buffalo, NY.
Dr. Fazioli teaches on-ground and distance learning sections of Critical Inquiry and Junior Seminar, courses that form the core of Mercy's General Education curriculum. Each of his classes adopts a particular theme (such as "Thinking Anthropologically" and "Who Owns the Past?") through which students strengthen their skills in reading, writing, critical thinking, information literacy, public speaking, and quantitative analysis. With over a decade of experience in higher education, Dr. Fazioli is passionate about teaching, and is always looking for new ways to engage and motivate his students. He firmly believes that education has the potential to be a transformative and emancipatory experience, allowing students to encounter the world -- and themselves -- in exciting, challenging, and even life-changing ways.
Dr. Fazioli's interdisciplinary research focuses on the archaeology and history of Central Europe during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (c. 300-900 CE). He has conducted fieldwork in Austria, Slovenia, Sweden, Denmark, and Northern Ireland, as well as across New York State. Dr. Fazioli has published on a variety of topics including landscape archaeology, ceramic petrography, social identity, the history of archaeology and anthropology, and critical thinking. His most recent book -- The Mirror of the Medieval: An Anthropology of the Western Historical Imagination (Berghahn Books, 2017) -- explores the myriad ways in which the medieval past has been appropriated by political and intellectual projects in the modern world (read reviews here). More information on Dr. Fazioli's research can be found at: https://mercy.academia.edu/KPatrickFazioli.
