Visiting Scholars

2022-2023

Maria Lubello, Ph.D. Candidate in History and Civilization of the Ancient World and the Near East at the Università delgi Studi di Firenze.

Maria Lubello's research field is the 4th and early 5th century in the Western Roman Empire, in particular the senatorial élites of the Urbs. She is working on a translation and historical commentary of the 7th and 8th books of the correspondence of the orator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a pagan senator who was prefect in Rome in 384-385 and consul in 391. The aim of the project is both to fill a gap left in Symmachian studies and to highlight these two books of letters that occupy a central role in the editorial process of Symmachus’ letter collection. The study of the letters allows us to reconstruct the last part of the author's life, to shed light on the historical context and epistolary habits of late antiquity, and to open new perspectives to the prosopographical research on the approximately 50 correspondents of the orator.

2018-2019

Nathanael Aschenbrenner, Ph.D. Candidate at Harvard University.

A historian of empire, Nate Aschenbrenner investigates imperial failures and rebirths in late medieval and early modern Europe, and in particular, how an imperial collapse of epochal proportions transformed political activity around the Mediterranean world and beyond. His current research traces Byzantium’s enduring role in the construction of an early modern European identity and its ideological impact on European quests to subjugate the globe through trade, conquest, and colonization.

His dissertation asks how Byzantine ideas of empire changed in the last decades before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and how Europeans appropriated the legacy of Byzantine imperial thought in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—a refashioning that helped revitalize the Roman imperial project from an anemic legal fiction at the end of the Middle Ages into an ideological engine for global schemes of exploration, conquest, and state formation in early modernity.

His next project examines how the study of Byzantium contributed to the early modern European scholarly enterprise, which stretched a new sense of Europe’s past and present across an increasingly sophisticated scholarly armature. Taking a new approach to this subject with the conviction that the production of Byzantine scholarship—like all others—was an inherently political activity, it will investigate how the creation of Byzantine Studies was a part of the formation of a European identity in a critical period of scholarly investigation and myth-making.

2016-2017

Ihor Lylo, Assistant Professor in the History of the Middle Ages and Byzantine Studies, Department of History, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine.

A Home Among Strangers — A Stranger at Home: Portraits of Greek Emigrants and Travelers in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth (15th-17th Centuries). This project focuses on the question of how Greek immigrants, as representatives of Orthodox culture could become an integral part of the Western World. During this time period, the interaction of Orthodox culture of the East and the Catholic Culture of the West created an interesting phenomenon on the border of Eastern European civilization: it shaped the character of the people of this area and their understanding of the outside world.

Apart from scholarly work, Ihor Lylo is also a social activist and a journalist, who hosts a popular historical program on “Lviv Wave” 100.8 FM.

2016

Ioannes Liritzis, Professor of Archaeometry at the University of the Aegean, on Rhodes, Greece, spent a term at UC San Diego on an Onassis Visiting Fellowship.

Ioannis Liritzis is Professor of Archaeometry at the University of the Aegean, on Rhodes, Greece, spent a term at UC San Diego on an Onassis Visiting Fellowship, on subjects of palaeoenvironment, natural sciences in cultural heritage, archaeoastronomy. He is now Distinguished Professor of Archaeometry-Natural Sciences at Henan University, China. Since 2020 he has been Dean of Class IV (Natural Sciences) in the European Academy of Sciences & Arts (Salzburg). He specialized in Natural Sciences in Archaeology - Cultural Heritage - Geoenvironment, though during his carrier he has done research on a range of multidisciplinary fields. Contributions are made in interdisciplinary fields of nuclear physics, geophysics, astronomy, archaeoastronomy, digital culture, palaeoclimatic variations, seismic periodicities, historical auroral records, Holocene climates, solar-terrestrial phenomena, chronological methods in the quaternary (U-Th series, OSL). He has earned National & International Awards, Prizes and Distinctions. From the publication and cited record he is included in the 2021 & 2022 Stanford list of top 2% ranked scientists in the World. Prior to the current positions, Ioannis worked with the Ministry of Culture, Dept. of Underwater Antiquities and the Research Center of Astronomy & Applied Mathematics, Academy of Athens. With a BSc from Patras University, earned his PhD from Edinburgh University (Physics Dept., and recipient of University Scholarship by Nobel prize winner Prof.Peter Higgs) and with graduate studies at McMaster University (supervised by Prof Henry Schwartz) (www.liritzis.eu)