Halsall's current research focuses on western Europe in the important period of change around AD 600 and on the application of continental philosophy (especially the work of Jacques Derrida) to history.
at York in 1991 with a thesis on the "history and archaeology of the region of Metz in the Merovingian period" supervised by Edward James and examined by Steve Roskams and Bryan Ward-Perkins.
[3][4] In June 2013, Halsall was one of the signatories to an open letter criticising the proposed changes to the British history curriculum being implemented by Conservative Minister for Education Michael Gove.
The letter expressed the opinion that the proposed reforms were "underpinned by an unbalanced promotion of partisan political views" in that they emphasised an Anglocentric "national triumphalism" and thus contravened the Education Acts of 1996 and 2002.
[9] This group contends that Germanic tribes had more stable ethnic identities than previously assumed,[10] and that the migrations of these peoples, facilitated by the expansion of the Huns, contributed significantly to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
[d] He notes that the rejection of an early Germanic culture is "still far from generally accepted" and that "attempts to change this intellectually careless state of affairs are making only slow process.
[12] The increased reliance on archaeogenetics in recent years has in the eye of Halsall led to a flourishing of pseudoscience, which threatens to reduce the concept of ethnicity "to something close to the nineteenth-century idea of race.