Centre for Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies

The University of Edinburgh has one of the largest concentrations of scholars researching the late antique, early Islamic and Byzantine worlds in the UK, and many of these staff and students are in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.

HCA Mosaic

The University of Edinburgh has one of the largest concentrations of scholars researching the late antique, early Islamic and Byzantine worlds in the UK, and many of these staff and students are in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.

The University of Edinburgh has one of the largest concentrations of scholars researching the late antique, early Islamic and Byzantine worlds in the UK. Colleagues working in these areas are concentrated in the School of History, Classics & Archaeology; the Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies; the School of Art History (Edinburgh College of Art); and the School of Divinity, and cooperate closely with each other, not least in the framework of Edinburgh’s innovative Master’s programme in Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies (LAIBS).

Late Antiquity, this formative period of world history from roughly the (mid) third century to c.800 – or even the end of the first millennium, in the reckoning of some scholars – has become a prominent area of research over the past few decades; it witnessed both the rise of Christianity and the birth of Islam, the ‘collapse’ of the Roman empire in the west, the struggle for survival of its eastern half, and the formation of the largest world-empire to that date, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. Late Antiquity is often studied in fruitful combination with the medieval heir to the eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium (as it is commonly called) on the one hand, and with the emerging Islamic world on the other, and such is the case at Edinburgh. Over the past century, Edinburgh has been the academic home to a number of distinguished late antique scholars and Byzantinists, including Professors David Talbot Rice, Donald MacGillivray Nicol, and Michael Angold, or preeminent early Islamicists, such as Professors William Montgomery Watt or Carole and Robert Hillenbrand.

During term time the Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies Centre runs the fortnightly Late Antique Lunches and Byzantine Colloquia as well as the once-per-month Byzantine Studies seminar, as an add-on to the rich seminar culture in late antique, Islamic and medieval studies already present at Edinburgh. Its student members organise Edinburgh’s annual international graduate conference in Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies.

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