I am a researcher interested in the social history of the Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) Empire in the second half of the First Millennium AD.
My research interests include medieval Greek language and literary culture; hagiography, heterodoxy, and ‘popular’ belief in the Orthodox and Muslim worlds; the interaction between Roman society and the environment, both natural and built; and the dynamics of social identities including political citizenship, religious affiliation, family, and sex. My first monograph, Roman Identity from the Arab Conquest to the Triumph of Orthodoxy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), explores how the Romanness of the citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire changed in the period from the mid-seventh through the mid-ninth centuries AD.
Ongoing and proposed reserach foci include the use of hagiography as a historical source; the emergence of the Coptic language and an Egyptian identity in Late Antiquity; and a history of the medieval Orthodox Church after the seventh ecumenical council. Other areas of interest include travel and travelogues in the Late Antique Aegean. I’m also interested in eastern Christian lanugages and thier historical literary traditions, including Coptic, Syriac and Armenian.
Since 2021 I am a visiting professor of Byzantine history at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilization (IHAC) at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, PR China. Graduate courses that I teach include a two-semester sequence on material culture in Later Roman and Early Byzantine periods, and reading classes in medieval Greek on select authors.