Seongmin Ahn

Biography

Seongmin Ahn is a Ph.D. student in medieval history at the University of Notre Dame. His research explores East Central Europe from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. He is particularly interested in dynastic marriage and in how regional dynasties used marriage alliances to navigate the inter-imperial space between the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires.

He received his BA in History and Political Science from Chung-Ang University in Seoul, South Korea, in 2023, followed by an MA in European History from the same university in 2025. His MA research examined how twelfth-century marriage alliances between the Byzantine imperial family and aristocratic families within the Holy Roman Empire facilitated pragmatic cooperation and forged kinship networks across imperial boundaries, despite ideological tensions between the two empires. While developing this project, he co-authored a 2025 peer-reviewed article with Yongku Cha on the Babenbergs of Austria, examining how they used one such marriage alliance to strengthen their political position within the Holy Roman Empire and extend their kinship networks beyond it. These questions now inform his doctoral research on Árpád Hungary and, more broadly, on how East Central European dynasties navigated relations with neighboring empires.

At Notre Dame, Ahn is a recipient of the University Presidential Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences.