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Volker L Menze is a Church Historian with a background in ancient history. He focuses on ecclesiastical history 300-700 CE and has a particular interest in Church Councils; he also teaches Global Christianities.
He has studied the post-Chalcedonian Christological Controversy and wrote his dissertation on Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008). His work includes editions of Syriac texts, an edited volume on Syriac hagiography and articles on the politics of church councils, book burnings, bribery, episcopal nepotism, and alternative ecclesiologies in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. His most recent monograph is entitled Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria: The Last Pharaoh and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023). An Arabic translation of it is forthcoming in 2025. An edited volume on From Ctesiphon to Toledo: Comparative Perspectives on Early Church Councils in East and West 300-700 is forthcoming in fall 2024 with the Annales Historiae Conciliorum 53.1 (2023).
Interviews:
Past Perfect! (Ivan Milekovic, CEU) with Peter Brown (Princeton) on his autobiography Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2023)
Byzantium and Friends (Anthony Kaldellis, Chicago) on Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria: The Last Pharaoh and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023)
Current Project:
(together with Richard Price) Alexander of Hierapolis, the See of Resafa and the ‘Nestorian Controversy’: Select Letters from the Collectio Casinensis