John Kee

I am a classicist and medievalist whose interests range across postclassical  literary and intellectual culture, often with an anchor in the twelfth century. My work so far has covered a variety of registers and genres in Greek (and sometimes Syriac). I’m particularly curious about interactions between different textual forms and between texts and their contemporary worlds—both specific social worlds and the encompassing natural world. These concerns have led me to think from several angles about the interface between the humanities and the natural and social sciences. At CEU, I’m pursuing related questions in the project Preaching as Power in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Byzantium supported by the ESPRIT program of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

I spent several years as a language teacher before starting postgraduate study, and teaching has been a passion throughout my career. In addition to offering courses in Byzantine studies and Greek in the upcoming term at CEU, for the past two years I’ve co-organized and taught the Byzantine Greek Summer School at the University of Vienna. With the same colleague, I am currently writing the first comprehensive intermediate-to-advanced textbook for late antique and medieval Greek.