Jake Ransohoff

I am a graduate alumnus of the Department of History at Harvard (Ph.D. 2022), and am currently a Mary Seeger O'Boyle Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. My dissertation, Sightless Eyes, Broken Bodies: Punitive Blinding, Social Exclusion, and the Politics of Disability in the Byzantine World, studied blindness and physical impairment as punishments for capital crimes in Byzantium, the medieval West, and the Mediterranean world. My wider interests include the historiography of Byzantine studies, the history of the medieval Balkans, and the environmental and archaeological study of the post-Roman Mediterranean; I have participated in or directed excavations at archaeological sites in Turkey, Spain, Bulgaria, and North Macedonia.

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Recent Publications

“Blinding as Punishment and Politics in Byzantium.” In A Global History of Crime and Punishment. Vol. 2. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2023. Publisher's Version

Ransohoff, Jake, and Nathanael Aschenbrenner, ed. The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2021. Publisher's Version

“'Consider the Future as Present': The Paranoid World of Kekaumenos.” Speculum 93, no. 1 (2018): 77-91. Publisher's Version

“An Empire 'Between Three Seas'? Mapping Late Medieval Bulgaria at Its Territorial Apogee.” Balkanistica 30, no. 2 (2017): 233-255.

“All the Tsar’s Men: Reflections on Power and Society in Asenid Bulgaria (1257–1393).” In Landscapes of Power: Selected Papers from the XV Oxford University Byzantine Society International Graduate Conference, 253-273. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2014.

Jake Ransohoff

Alumnus, Department of History

Recent Publications