Professor Catherine Holmes

My research focuses primarily on the politics and cultures of the Mediterranean world between the tenth and early fifteenth centuries. I am particularly interested in frontiers, in relations between different religious and ethnic groups, in comparative political culture, and in the Global Middle Ages. Although Byzantium has been my specialist area of research ever since my doctoral studies in the 1990s, I have always sought to put Byzantine and medieval studies into much larger temporal, thematic and geographical frameworks.    

Research Interests

In 2005 I completed a monograph which developed my doctoral research on tenth- and eleventh-century Byzantine politics, government and historiography: Basil II and the Governance of Empire, 976-1025. Having focused up to that point on 'Middle Byzantium', I went on to think more closely about the eastern Mediterranean world that was created in the later Middle Ages by the collapse of Byzantium and the rise of the Ottomans, co-editing a book in this field with Jonathan Harris and Eugenia Russell in 2012: Byzantines, Latins and Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean World after 1150. Working on this book, which operated across an extensive eastern Mediterranean canvas, alerted me to the possibilities of studying the Middle Ages on a global scale. Together with Naomi Standen (Birmingham University), I organised a network of historians and archaeologists with interests in different world regions during the medieval period. This AHRC-funded project led to another co-edited volume, The Global Middle Ages (2018), a book which tackles a series of themes that our project members believed to be particularly characteristic of the global in the pre-modern world. In parallel with this initiative I was also the co-convenor of a long-standing, trans-regional comparative political culture project with Jonathan Shepard, Jo Van Steenbergen and the late Bjorn Weiler [eventually published as Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c.700-c.1500: A Framework for Comparing Three Spheres (2021)]. Between 2011 and 2021 I was also one of the editors of The English Historical Review, focusing on the medieval and twentieth-century article and book review content.

In my current research I am considering how best to apply insights I gained from working with large-scale collaborative projects to my understanding of the Byzantine world. In this context, I am trying to write a short book about 'Global Byzantium'. Working together with Dr Alex Belay of Debre Berhan University in Ethiopia under the auspices of 'Africa Oxford', I am also thinking about how to connect the material culture of east Africa with wider global history concepts. And I remain very interested in approaches to political history in the premodern world. I am particularly preoccupied with the question of how concepts and evidence bases from contexts beyond Eurasia may relate to histories of power in those societies with which I am more familiar.

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