Professor Peter Frankopan FRHistS FRSL FRAS FRGS FRSA FRAI

I am Professor of Global History and have been Senior Research Fellow at Worcester since 2000. I have been Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research since it was founded in 2010. I’m a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Anthropological Institute. I am also President of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs.

I mainly teach Master’s students on the Late Antique and Byzantine Studies or Global and Imperial History Courses. Current and recent DPhil students include those working on frontier lands in late antiquity; on chronicles of Salerno; and on European colonisations of the Maldives. For undergraduate courses, I teach the Crusades Further Subject, Justinian and Muhammad, Constantine VII Porphyrogennitus and his world, and General History 4.

I work on the histories of exchange, with a primary focus on the peoples, cultures and geographies of Russia/Ukraine, Central and South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and China in the past and present. I am interested in the histories of religions, literatures and linguistics, trade, technology and infrastructure, colonisations and identities. I work too on the histories of disease as well as on those of the natural world, including climatic change.

My main publications are The First Crusade: The Call from the East (2012); The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015); The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018); The Silk Roads: An Illustrated Edition (2018); The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (2023). I also translated The Alexiad of Anna Komene for Penguin Classics (2008). I have published almost fifty academic papers, ranging from Byzantine literature to the Belt and Road initiative, to the point and purposes of global history.