Byzantine Studies at Edinburgh

Byzantine Studies at Edinburgh cover the history, culture, art and literature of the medieval eastern Roman empire from the age of Justinian to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and beyond.

Looking back on a long and distinguished tradition, the University of Edinburgh is a leading centre in the UK for researching and studying Byzantine (medieval Greek and medieval eastern Roman) history and culture.

Research and teaching

Current research foci are Evliya Çelebi's travels in Greece (Professor Angold); Nonnos’ Dionysiaka and the poetics of late antique Greek epic (Dr Maciver); post-Byzantine Ravenna (Dr Brown); Byzantine tent culture and the Christos Paschon (Professor Mullett); comparative approaches to the Byzantine world, especially with China; Byzantine authorial manuscripts and manuscript culture Byzantine schools and learning; late Byzantine social performances (Professor Gaul); Romanness and identity in the Byzantine empire; rebellions and civil war in Byzantium (Dr Stouraitis); pan-Mediterranean dialogues of power and prestige, contextualising late Byzantine architecture (Dr Varsallona).

At both MA (undergraduate) and MSc (taught postgraduate) level, the School of History, Classics and Archaeology offers a wide range of courses that specialise in the study of the Byzantine world.

Honours and PG courses

Our current choice of courses at honours and postgraduatel level covers (almost) all aspects of Byzantine history from 600 into the early post-Byzantine/Ottoman period:

  • *Constantinople: The History of a Medieval Megalopolis from Constantine the Great to Süleyman the Magnificent
  • *The Formation of the Medieval Roman Empire, 602–867
  • *Cente, Province and Periphery: The Byzantine World in the Age of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos
  • The Long Twelfth Century: Byzantium in the Era of the Crusades (1071–1204)
  • *Renovatio Imperii or ‘Twilight of Empire’? The Eastern Roman Empire under Andronikos II Palaiologos, 1282–1328
  • Religion and War in Byzantium and in Comparative Perspective
  • *Popular Unrest, Revolts, and Rebellions in the Byzantine World
  • *Greek Palaeography and Manuscript Studies
  • Art and Society in the Byzantine World
  • Mediterranean Interactions in the Late Middle Ages: The Visual Culture of Byzantium, the Ottomans and the Italian Peninsula

Courses marked with an asterisk as available at both UG and PG level. Additionally at postgraduate level, we run the

  • Byzantine Text Seminar or an equivalent reading group.

Pre-honours courses

Our second-year pre-honours course, ‘Transformations of the Roman World: Toward Byzantium and the Early Medieval West’ attracts about 130 students every year and provides ample tutoring opportunities for our doctoral students.


  • Prosopography of the Byzantine World
  • Neophytos Enkleistos’s Testamentary Typikon

  • PAIXUE | From 2017 to 2023, Professor Gaul was PI of a Byzantinist-Sinologist project funded by the European Research Council, ‘PAIXUE: Classicising learning in medieval imperial systems: cross-cultural approaches to Byzantine paideia and Tang/Song xue’ (CoG 726371). 

    Learn more about the project

Publications

In a fruitful collaboration with our colleagues at Edinburgh University Press, Byzantine Studies at Edinburgh supports the publication of cutting-edge monographs and edited volumes (in the Edinburgh Byzantine Studies series) as well as of article-length, groundbreaking interdisciplinary research (in the Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies).

Community

Our current team is comprised of a lively community of about 15 senior and student members.

Dr Mike Carr (History), Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval History
Professor Niels Gaul (Classics), A. G. Leventis Professor of Byzantine Studies
Dr Marie Legendre (IMES), Senior Lecturer in Early Islamic History
Dr Calum Maciver (Classics), Senior Lecturer in Classics
Dr Nik Matheou (History), Lecturer in Global Medieval History
Dr Yannis Stouraitis (Classics), Senior Lecturer in Byzantine History
Dr Dimitris Theodossopoulos (History of Architecture), Lecturer in Architectural Technology and Conservation
Dr Jessica Varsallona (Classics), British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Professor Michael Angold, Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History
Dr Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, Honorary Fellow in History; Professor of History of Medicine at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Dr Tom Brown, Honorary Fellow in History; former Reader in Medieval History
Professor Jim Crow, Professor Emeritus of Roman and Byzantine Archaeology
Professor Margaret Mullett, Honorary Professor in Classics; Professor Emerita of Byzantine Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast and Director Emerita of Byzantine Studies, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C.
 
Visiting scholar, 2026/7
Dr Niels De Ridder, Visiting Scholar in Classics; DAAD Prime Fellow at the University of Cologne

Bilal Adıgüzel‘Patterns of resistance and subversion in the middle Byzantine empire: Niketas David Paphlagon in context’
Daiki Sano‘Lament for Lost Anatolia: narrative structure, political thought and the performance of imperial decision-making in George Pachymeres’
Callum Hendleman ‘Constructing and addressing female voices in late Byzantine literary culture: from epistolography to ethopoiia’
Lucas Butler‘Geography and Roman identity in the middle Byzantine period’
Dido Papikinou‘Being a philosopher in an age of conquest: Greek educational networks and intellectual life in late and post-Byzantine Constantinople’

Charlie Gutteridge

 

‘An emperor among monks: Ioannes VI Kantakouzenos and the politics and perceptions of post-abdication authority in late Byzantium’

Alasdair C. Grant‘Cross-confessional captivity in the later Byzantine world, c.1280–1460’PhD 2020
Mark Huggins‘The reception of John Chrysostom in the middle Byzantine period (9th–13th centuries): A case study of the Catechetical Homily on Pascha’ PhD 2021
Defangyu (Charles) Kong‘Empresses Eirene and Wu Zetian: examining female imperial authority in early medieval Byzantium through a comparative lens’PhD 2026
Shinichi Kubo‘Reading classicising Greek oratory as written texts: Case studies from Aelius Aristides, Libanius, Gregory Nazianzen and Michael Psellos’ 
Ivan Marić‘Iconoclast imperial authority and its contested legacy: From the Arab siege (717/18) to the death of Michael III (867)’ PhD 2020
Mihail Mitrea‘A late Byzantine hagiographer: Philotheos Kokkinos and his vitae of contemporary saints’PhD 2018
David Moore‘Michael VIII Palaiologos: Imperial governance in the face of “Orthodox” rebellion, 1261–1282​’MScR 2026
Aristotelis Nayfa ‘Monetary exchanges and social capital in the tenth century Byzantine court’PhD 2023
Elif Neyzi ‘Monasticism in late Byzantine Constantinople (1261–1453): urban, social and institutional history’PhD 2024
Joaquín Serrano del Pozo‘Invincible weapons: Christian relics in late Roman and Byzantine war (AD 310–1204)’PhD 2024
Chen Yixiao‘Provincial governance in tenth-century Byzantium: an asymmetrical comparison with Tang China during the Yuanhe Reign (806–820)’MScR 2026
Ruisen Zheng‘Living law and living justice: The exercise of judicial discretionary power in eleventh-century Byzantium and Song China’MScR 2022

We regularly meet for research seminars, work-in-progress workshops, reading groups or social outings.

Byzantine traditions at Edinburgh

It would be tempting to seek the beginnings of Byzantine Studies at Edinburgh with John Stuart Blackie (1809–1895), Edinburgh’s eccentric Professor of Greek who advocated the modern pronunciation of ancient Greek, and his older contemporary George Finlay (1799–1875), the equally eccentric Scottish philhellenist and resident of Athens who composed the first history of Byzantium that at least partially contradicted Edward Gibbon’s lastingly powerful paradigm of the ‘decline and fall’ of the Roman empire. The pioneering scholar of Byzantine architecture, student of the imposing Theodosian walls and Professor of History at Roberts College (now Boğaziçi University), Istanbul, Alexander Van Millingen (1840–1915), was an Edinburgh alumnus. 

However, the first salaried Byzantinist at the University of Edinburgh was probably David Talbot Rice (1903–1972), the University’s Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art from 1934 to 1972, a leading expert in the art and archaeology of the Byzantine world. His excavations of the Great Palace in Constantinople and research on the ‘pocket empire’ of Trebizond are of lasting importance.

Since the 1970s, Edinburgh has been home to several distinguishded Byzantinists: briefly Donald McGillivray Nicol (1923–2003), who taught at Edinburgh from 1966 to 1970 before he moved on to the Koraes Chair in Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London; Michael Angold, who joined the University as Nicol’s successor and was its distinguished Professor of Byzantine History from 1996 to his retirement in 2005, and Jim Crow, Professor of Roman and Byzantine Archaeology from 2008 to his retirement in 2023. Professor Crow presently serves as Chair of the British Institute in Ankara.

The A. G. Leventis Chair in Byzantine Studies was created in 2015 and the Lectureship in Byzantine History revived in 2018.

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