School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Staff

Reader, History subject area

T.S.Brown@ed.ac.uk
0131 650 3761
Room 307, William Robertson Building

After obtaining his first degree at Edinburgh he completed his Ph.D at the University of Nottingham. He then held a Junior Research fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks Centre for Byzantine Studies, Washington DC, for two years and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Birmingham. From 1978 to 1980 he was lecturer in Medieval Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. He joined Edinburgh as a lecturer in medieval history in 1980 and is now Reader.

His original research was on the social history of Byzantine Italy and in 1984 he published Gentlemen and Officers: imperial administration and aristocratic power in Byzantine Italy A.D. 554-800. Since then his interests have extended into early medieval urban history, especially that of Italy, East-West relations, and the history of the south of Italy, Sicily and the Adriatic zone from late antiquity to the Norman period. A particular focus recently has been the role of local clergy and ecclesiastical institutions in the social and cultural life of early medieval Italian cities. He is currently writing a general history of Italy from 500 to 1200 and a history of the city of Ravenna and its hinterland from Justinian to Otto III and is researching in the comparative political, economic and cultural developments in the Adriatic zone, ca.800 - 962..

See School Theses Archive

• Charlemagne and his World: Society and Empire in Western Europe c.750 – c.900 (4MA)
  
• The Fall of Rome (Option)
  
• Italy and the Mediterranean from Constantine to the Crusades (Option)
  
• Clash of the empires and religious conflict in the eastern Mediterranean world from Justinian to Iconoclasm (c.550-c.800) (Option)