I am a researcher interested in the social history of the Eastern Roman (‘Byzantine’) Empire in the second half of the First Millennium and opening century of the Second Millennium AD. From April 2026 through March 2028 I hold a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (Horizon-MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cologne for the project ‘The Prosopography of the Imperial Church of the Empire of the Romans in Antioch during the time of Nikon of the Black Mountain, circa AD 950-1100’ (PICERAN, Project ID 101208459, funded by the European Union).
My research interests include: medieval Greek language and literary culture; hagiography and ‘popular’ belief; the interaction between Roman society and the environment (natural and built); and the dynamics of social identities (including citizenship, religious affiliation, family, and gender). 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.
My second book, co-edited with Prof. Dr. Claudia Sode (Cologne), is titled Realism in Hagiography. The volume aims to furnish students and scholars with new methodologies for interpreting medieval literature on saints and miracles. By adopting realism as a framing paradigm and moving the discussion beyond the categories of fiction and fictionality, the diverse perspectives in this collection enable novel understandings of these texts as inherently coherent.
Other recent research foci include: Late Antique Christian attitudes about ancient statuary art; the emergence of the Coptic language and an Egyptian identity in Late Antiquity; and the history of the State Church of the Eastern Roman Empire. Other areas of interest include travel and travelogues in the Late Antique Aegean. I’m also interested in eastern Christian languages and their historical literary traditions, including Coptic, Syriac and Armenian.
From 2021 through 2024, I was the Visiting Professor of Byzantine History at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilization (IHAC) at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, PR China. I taught graduate courses, including: Eastern Roman history seminar; a two-semester sequence on Late Antique material culture; and reading classes in medieval Greek on select authors.