Judith Herrin


Judith Herrin is a British archaeologist and academic of Late Antiquity. She was Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies and Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow at King's College London.

Early life

Herrin was educated at Bedales School, after which she studied history at the University of Cambridge, and was awarded her PhD in 1972 from the University of Birmingham. She trained in Paris, Athens and Munich.

Career

Herrin worked as an archaeologist with the British School at Athens and on the site of Kalenderhane Mosque in Istanbul as a Dumbarton Oaks fellow. Between 1991 and 1995, she was Stanley J. Seeger Professor in Byzantine History, Princeton University. She was appointed Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London in 1995, and was Head of the Center for Hellenic Studies at KCL. She retired from the post in 2008, becoming Professor Emeritus. She was president of the International Congress of Byzantine Studies in 2011.
In 2016 she won the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History.

Critical reception

In 2013, G.W. Bowersock said in a New York Review of Books article that The Formation of Christendom had since its publication in 1987 meant "many historians suddenly discovered that early medieval Christianity was far more complex than they had ever imagined". Her book Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium with its "comparative perspective on Byzantium, European Christendom, and Islam reflects a lifetime of distinguished work on the Byzantine Empire."
Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire was similarly well received by academic historians writing in the UK broadsheet press. Norman Stone commented in The Guardian: "Herrin is excellent on the Ravenna of Justinian, with the extraordinary mosaics that somehow survived the second world war and she is very good on that odd Byzantine phenomenon, the woman in power". He concluded "Judith Herrin can work her way into the mind of Byzantium, and she gives prominence especially to the artistic side. A very good book, all in all." In The Daily Telegraph, Noel Malcolm stated: "her general readers will mostly be people whose history lessons at school have left them thinking in terms of a West-centred sequence: 'Rome – Dark Ages – Middle Ages – Renaissance'. Their brains need some re-calibrating if they are to understand the rather different pattern of development that took place in the 'Rome of the East'; and that is the task which Judith Herrin has now performed, deftly and with much learning lightly worn".

Honours