Academia
Peter is Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He has been Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College since 2000. His academic work revolves around teaching commitments, including PhD supervision; co-ordinating research programmes; hosting visiting scholars; leading outreach initiatives; mentoring early career scholars; and devising and taking part in academic conferences, seminars and lecture series related to the history of the peoples, cultures and regions of Europe, Asia and Africa.
As Associate Director of the Programme in and Professor of Silk Roads Studies at King’s College, Cambridge, Peter is involved in creating and hosting a termly seminar series, such as on the gold of the steppes; urbanisation in medieval Armenia; Sogdian sarcophagi; Gandharan art; the Russian conquest of Central Asia in the 19th century; multiculturalism in Dunhuang; elites in 12-14th century Georgia; gender and art in contemporary Central Asia or China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Since 2000, the programme has also convened conferences on the Alash movement in Kazakhstan in the 20th century, on rivers in Central Asia and on the transmission of medical knowledge in the monsoon worlds of the Indian Ocean.
For more information about the Silk Roads programme at King’s, please click here.
Peter wrote the introduction for a new edition of the Folio Society’s publication of The Histories by Herodotus that was published in 2020.
For more information about this limited edition set, please click here.
Peter was Senior Academic advisor and part of a team that wrote a major report on The Web of Transport Corridors in South Asia for the World Bank.
Published in August 2018, the report was a joint effort between the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Japan International Cooperation Agency and the UK’s Department for International Development. It looks at the ways in which infrastructure and investment stimulate growth, but also at the socio-economic and environmental impact of greater connectivity. To read the report, click here.
In June 2021, Peter convened and hosted a conference at King’s College, Cambridge, called: ‘The Revolutions of 1917: Consequences for Central Asia.’ Speakers included Nicola Piaciola, Alun Thomas, Botakoz Kassymbekova, Tomohiko Uyama and HE Erlan Idrissov, the Kazakh Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
In March 2021, Peter convened and hosted a conference on climate change in the Roman, Late Antiquity and Byzantine worlds. Speakers included Andrew Wilson, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, John Haldon, Elena Xoplaki, Victoria Smith and Sabine Heubner. See here for more.
Peter co-edited, with Steven Brakman, Harry Garretsen and Charles van Marrewijk, a special volume of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, focusing on China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It was published in the spring of 2019.
Peter is Series Editor of a major new multi-volume Cambridge University Press series centred on the history of Constantinople. The first volumes in the series, on statues in Constantinople and on the Hippodrome, were published in 2021.
Peter’s translation of The Alexiad by Anna Komnene for Penguin Classics was published in 2009. One of the crown jewels of Byzantine literature, it was written in the 12th century by a daughter of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081-1118). Narrated in flamboyant style in florid Greek, it draws on a stunning array of documentary sources, letters and campaign notes, The text captures the Byzantine Empire at a momentous point in its history, and provides a riveting – and much misunderstood – window to the past.
Croatia Through Writers’ Eyes
Croatia Through Writers’ Eyes provides a selection of some of the best travel writing about Croatia from antiquity to the 20th century. Peter provides an introduction detailing key themes from Croatia’s past, from the era in which the coastline was an important part of the Roman Empire, to the brutal sack of Zadar in 1202 by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. For centuries, the country was a pivotal location along the trade routes of the Adriatic, and a pawn in the competition between Venice, Hungary and Constantinople. Things changed dramatically with the advance of the Ottomans into eastern and central Europe, and then again as World Wars scarred this part of the globe. This book is a lovely guide that shows how many famous visitors understood Croatia, and how they wrote about their visits.
Landscapes of Power: Selected Papers from the XV Oxford University Byzantine Society International Graduate Conference
Each year, some of the best young scholars in the world gather in Oxford to present papers on their latest research in a conference supported by the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research.
This volume gathers the best papers from the 15th Annual Conference, held in the spring of 2013. Peter’s introduction considers how to address questions about imperial, elite and local power in the Byzantine Empire, and how we make sense of continuities and changes over more than a millennium of history.
Peter provides the Introduction to Timothy Venning’s monumental Chronology of the Crusades, in which he summarizes and contextualizes the Crusade era that followed the first expedition to Jerusalem in 1096.
This book catalogues the events of the 450 years that followed the launch of the earliest efforts to take the Holy City, up to the Turkish attack on Belgrade in 1456. Combing the sources across a range of languages, Venning provides a meticulous day-by-day account of the main developments in this period, charting attacks and counter-attacks, recording appeals for help, noting grants of land, accounting for letters sent to and from the Holy Land, and showing how the momentum finally swung decisively in the Muslims’ favour.
