Educated in Bulgaria (National Classical Lyceum) and the United States (BA Wabash, PhD Harvard), I joined the History Department after over a decade-long career as a researcher, lecturer, and professor at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Birmingham. My first book (Cambridge, 2007) examined the continuities and discontinuites in political rhetoric and thought in the Byzantium after the Fourth Crusade. Later I worked on issues of church and society, subversion of authority, imagined geography, and court ceremonies in the Byzantine Empire. Most recently, I authored a personal, political, and intellectual biography of Theodore Laskaris: a maverick ruler, original philosopher, and passionate ideologue of Hellenism in Byzantium. Current and future projects include translations, Byzantine ideas about geography and the world, Byzantium as an empire, and the politics of fake news and rumor.  My undergraduate graduate and undergraduate courses deal, broadly speaking, with politics and intellectual culture in Byzantium, and their synchronic and diachronic contexts.