SPEROS VRYONIS
On Lowell Clucas
The Byzantine Legacy in Folk Life and Tradition in the Balkans
Milton V. Anastos
Biographical Note
Speros Vryonis, Jr., is one of the most eminent Byzantinists of his generation. After a distinguished career at UCLA, he became the founding director of the Alexander S. Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies at New York University, from which he retired as emeritus Alexander S. Onassis professor of Hellenic civilization. Prof. Vryonis’s extensive work on the history and culture of the Greeks from Homer to the present, and on their relations with the Slavic, Islamic, and New Worlds, includes the seminal The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century; Byzantium and Europe; Studies on Byzantium, Seljuks and Ottomans; Byzantium: Its Internal History and Relations with the Islamic World; and Studies in Byzantine Institutions and Society. He has also edited, among other volumes, Aspects of the Balkans: Continuity and Change (with Henrik Birnbaum); Essays on the Slavic World and the Eleventh Century; Islam and Cultural Change in the Middle Ages; Individualism and Conformity in Classical Islam (with Amin Banani); and Islam’s Understanding of Itself (with Richard G. Hovannisian). In 2005 published his book The Mechanism of Catastrophe. The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul.
Prof. Vryonis is a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Philosophical Society.
|
