Judith Herrin

Dr. Judith Herrin is the Constantine Leventis Senior Visiting Fellow at King’s College London, Department of Classics. Her research focuses on Byzantine and medieval history, particularly the city of Ravenna and its anonymous Cosmographer. She is affiliated with the Wittgenstein Project Moving Byzantium (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna) and serves on numerous advisory boards, including the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and the Stavros Niarchos-Koç Center for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Koç University, Istanbul.

Her career spans teaching at Princeton University and King’s College London. She has authored seminal works on Byzantine history, including Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (2021), which won the Duff Cooper Prize and was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize. Her research interests bridge political, cultural, and religious dimensions of medieval empires, with a focus on gender, urban centers, and imperial authority.

Key publications analyze Byzantium’s legacy, women’s roles, and the interplay between margins and metropolis in imperial governance. Herrin has actively engaged with public history through BBC radio programs, literary festivals, and lectures, including the Amos Anderson Annual Lecture and Cheltenham Literary Festival.