Princeton University History Department

John Haldon is Shelby Cullom Davis '30 Professor of European History, and Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies.  He has been Director of Graduate Studies for the History Department since July 2009.  His research centers on the socio-economic, institutional, political and cultural history of the early and middle Byzantine empire from the seventh to the eleventh centuries. He also works on political systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times and has explored how resources were produced, distributed and consumed, especially in warfare, during the late ancient and medieval periods. Professor Haldon is the author and co-author of more than two dozen books. His most recent books are The social history of Byzantium (Blackwell, Oxford 2008) and Byzantium in the iconoclast era: a history, with L. Brubaker (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2011).

Professor Haldon is the director of the Euchaita/Avkat Project - an archaeological and historical survey in north central Turkey.  As well as traditional methods of field survey and historical research, this long-term project employs cutting edge survey, mapping and digital modeling techniques to enrich our understanding of the society, economy, land use, demography, paleo-environmental history and resources of the late Roman, Byzantine and Seljuk/Ottoman periods. Further information on the Euchaita/Avkat Project is available through the following links.

Website: http://www.princeton.edu/avkat
Online Article: History, Remote Sensing, and GIS: the Avkat Survey Project
Talk: Podcast
Presentation: PDF

He is also co-director of the international Medieval Logistics Project - an international project deploying Geographical Information Systems and sophisticated modelling software to analyze the logistics of East Roman, early medieval Western European and Early Islamic warfare and structures of resource allocation.

A native of Northumbria, England, Professor Haldon has worked at the Universities of Athens and Munich, at the Max-Planck-Institut for European Legal History in Frankfurt, and at the University of Birmingham, where from 1995 he was Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies and from 2000-2004 Head of the School of Historical Studies. He came to Princeton University in 2005.   From 2007-2013 he is a Senior Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington D.C.   He is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and a member of the editorial boards of several scholarly journals in Europe and the USA.

Include continuing work on issues of medieval resources and logistics; the preparation of a critical commentary for a translation on the 10^th century military treatise, the "Taktika" of the emperor Leo VI for Dumbarton Oak Studies; the Avkat project (see above); work on various texts and related issues of the seventh to eleventh centuries; and on comparative state formation in pre-modern societies

Include a wide range of courses in the field of Byzantine history from the late Roman to the 12th century. Recent courses include "Problems of Byzantine History - Formation of Byzantium 600-850: Sources and Problems," "Transformation of the Ancient World: Byzantium 500-1200," "War and Peace in the Medieval World," and "Byzantium in the 10th Century."