BIOGRAPHY AND INTERESTS

I am a historian of the Byzantine Empire with broad interests in its politics and intellectual life. My first book, Imperial Ideology and Political Thought in Byzantium, 1204-1330 (Cambridge, 2007), grew out of a sense of dissatisfaction with the way in which modern historians had traditionally reduced the political imagination in Byzantium to ossified and dogmatic views about the emperor and the empire (the so-called Kaiseridee).  The book brought to light a series of lively debates on governance, reform, and the nature of the polity during the restoration of Byzantium in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. My continuing interests in the later period led me to collaborate with colleagues at the University of Birmingham, where I spent a decade before joining Harvard, on the reedition, translation, and commentary of a unique fourteenth-century text on court ceremonies, court attire, and court titles (Farnham, 2013). My next book, The Byzantine Hellene: The Life of Emperor Theodore Laskaris and Byzantium in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 2019), was a historical biography reconstructing the life and thought-world of a fascinating political figure, author, and philosopher—the emperor Theodore II Laskaris. A sequel which is about to appear in the new Dumbarton Oaks series Graphai represents the first translation and commentary in any modern language of eight important texts by Laskaris, including some little-known gems of medieval Greek literature and thought.
 
My current work includes two large-scale projects. One of them is a new history of Byzantine political thought which investigates discussions on political virtue and tyranny from the fifth to the fifteenth century, focusing on key arguments and on important periods of debate. In what deeply original ways did the elites of the empire of New Rome keep drawing on a rich intellectual tradition going back to antiquity in order to address the ever-present danger of the abuse of power? The other large-scale project is a collaborative study of a remarkable geographical anthology compiled by the twelfth-century scholar Eustathios of Thessaloniki—a seminal text for understanding both the reception of ancient geographical authors in Byzantium and the thirst for knowledge by twelfth-century Constantinopolitans about the history and geography (both human and physical) of diverse lands stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the West all the way to China in the East.

 

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