Spirituality in Late Byzantium: Essays Presenting New Research by International Scholars

Eugenia Russell studied for her PhD at the History Department, Royal Holloway, University of London under the supervision of Jonathan Harris. Her thesis on the Encomia to St Demetrius in Late Byzantine Thessalonica discusses classical and Biblical subtexts in a historical framework. It has also shown, in the words of her examiners, 'that the generally negative view of Byzantine literature that has long prevailed is untenable'. For her ambitious views on education and the dissemination of knowledge, in 2006 she won a competitive place on the Summer School of the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprise, which was held at Birkbeck College, University of London. She organised an international conference in the following year. The resulting volume, Spirituality in Late Byzantium: Essays presenting new research by international scholars is to be published in 2010 by Cambridge Scholars Press. She has given academic papers at Saint Xavier University, Chicago; Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; Trinity College, Dublin as well as many in the UK. She is a reviewer for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review and for the Southwest Journal of Cultures and a member of the Editorial Board of Social Histories, Pompeii: Open Access Journal. Her current research on the fifteenth century Greek emigre Andronikos Kallistos (c. 1400-1476) and his pupils crosses the boundaries between classical reception and the comparative study of vernacular literatures. An off-shoot of this study is a paper on Byzantine monodies and laudes and she is also preparing a paper on methodologies for Byzantinists.