Interests/ Links
Further information
Teaching
I teach a wide range of the survey courses and specialist options in medieval history which are currently offered to undergraduate historians by the History Faculty . The survey courses I teach include first- and second-year options in General history between 900 and 1500 C.E. (i.e. European and extra-European history) as well as the principal paper in late medieval British history (British III). I also teach a series of specialist options: 'Chivalry and the Hundred Years War' (first-year course); 'The Crusades' (second-year course for which I am also the Faculty course convenor); 'Byzantium in the Age of Constantine Porphyrogenitus' (third-year course). I supervise theses regularly for the MSt in Medieval History and Medieval Studies. I supervise doctoral students in the fields of Byzantine political and cultural history (after 850 C.E.) and Mediterranean cultural and political history from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries (with a particular focus on the eastern Mediterranean).
Articles & publications
Books:
Basil II and the Governance of Empire (976-1025) (Oxford, 2005)
Edited collections:
(ed. with J S Waring), Literacy, Education and Manuscript Transmission in Byzantium and Beyond (Leiden, Brill, 2002)
(ed.) with J. Harris and E. Russell, Byzantines, Latins and Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean World after 1150 (Oxford, 2012), includes my own contribution, ‘Shared Worlds? A Question of Evidence’.
(ed.) with B. Weiler, J. Van Steenbergen and J.Shepard, Political Culture in Three Spheres (Cambridge, forthcoming)
Articles and chapters:
'How the East was won in the Reign of Basil II', in A. Eastmond (ed.), Eastern Approaches to Byzantium (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 41-56
‘'The Byzantine Eastern Frontier in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries' in D. Abulafia and N. Berend (eds.), Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices (Aldershot, 2002), 83-104
‘Political Elites in the Reign of Basil II’, in P. Magdalino (ed.), Byzantium in the Year 1000 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 35-70
'The Rhetorical Structures of John Skylitzes's ""Synopsis Historion""' in Rhetoric in Byzantium, ed. E. Jeffreys (Aldershot, 2003), pp.187-99
'Constantinople in the reign of Basil II' in E. Jeffreys (ed.) Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilisation: in Honour of Sir Steven Runciman (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 326-339
‘Byzantine historians at the periphery’, 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies, London, 2006, http://www.wra1th.plus.com/byzcong/paper/V/V.1_Holmes.pdf
'Treaties between Byzantium and the Islamic World', in War and Peace in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, in P. De Souza and J. France (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 141-57
‘Historical Survey: 800-1204’, in E. Jeffreys, et al.(eds.), Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies (Oxford, 2008), pp. 264-79
'Compilation Literature and Byzantine Political Culture in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries' Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 64 (2010)
'Political Literacy', in P. Stephenson (ed.) The Byzantine World (London: Routledge, 2010), pp.137-48
'Provinces and Capital', in L. James (ed.), A Companion to Byzantium (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 55-67
'Basil II, Bulgaroktonos and the 1014 Blinding of Bulgarian Prisoners-of-War: Mutilation and Surrender in the Middle Ages', in How Fighting Ends. A History of Surrender, ed. H. Afflerbach and H. Strachan (Oxford, 2012)