For more detailed information about me and my research, please visit my website.

I am interested in premodern periods of crisis, decline and large-scale historical change, and their impact on culture and social structures. My dissertation, which I am finalizing, explores the eleventh century crisis in Byzantium. I am also the director and PI of FLAME (Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy), a large international digital humanities project that investigates the early medieval economy against the backdrop of the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam. Additionally, I am the associate director and co-PI of the CCHRI (Climate Change and History Research Initiative, in which my research examines resilience to short-term cataclysmic events in the premodern eastern Mediterranean. My next project, Remembering Rome, Forgetting Byzantium: Afterlives of an Empire, inquires into the historical memory of the Roman and Byzantine Empires in public space in their modern successor states in the eastern Mediterranean.

My dissertation, Emperors and Elites in the Eleventh Century Eastern Roman Empire, examines the socio-cultural transformation in Byzantium on the eve of the Crusades. Textual sources of different genres from Iceland to Iran, alongside material culture such as coins, seals and objects of fine art, are the foundation of my research. I build upon this with tools such as network analysis to link between large groups of contemporary individuals. I demonstrate how Byzantium’s burgeoning’s diversity triggered social change in elite society, for instance in patterns of foreigner elites joining the empire, or the in ongoing negotiation of power between men, women and eunuchs. I contextualize these developments by comparisons to contemporaries in Western Europe and the Islamic Middle East.

Publications

2015. The Last Century of Theophanes’ Chronicle: A Statistical Approach, Travaux et Mémoires 19, pp. 445-466.

(under review) (co-authored with Alan Stahl) Late Antique and Early Medieval Imitations and the FLAME Database. Submitted to the Journal of Nordic Numismatics.

(under review) Benjamin of Tudela and his Book of Travels, in Byzantine Texts on Art and Aesthetics, Vol. II: From the Komnenoi to the rise of Hesychasm (1081- ca.1330), eds. Charles Barber and Foteini Spingou.

Education

2011- PhD (ABD), Byzantine History, Princeton University

2011, MA, Clinical Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, magna cum laude

2009, BA, History and Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, summa cum laude