My research interests have focused on the social and political history of England and France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries My first work dealt with violent conflict and peasant social structure in thirteenth-century England. After finishing this project, I became interested in the social determinants of political behavior. My first effort to grapple with this complex of issues was a study that compared the conquest of North Wales by the English with the conquest of Languedoc by the French. My attention then turned to questions of coercion, discipline, and repression. This resulted in a book on the inquisition in the south of France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. I continue to be interested in the impact of heresy-hunting on medieval society, but my interests have also begun to turn to how the various social systems of Afro-Eurasia -- settled peasants, pastoral nomads, hunters and gatherers, -- interacted with one another in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.