Peter Frankopan

Peter has been the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research since it was established in 2010. He has written extensively on the history of the Byzantine Empire and on the Komnenoi in particular. He has translated The Alexiad of Anna Komnene for Penguin Classics and most recently co-edited (with Jonathan Shepard) Revisiting the Byzantine Commonwealth: Nodes, Networks and Spheres, a major reconceptualization of the Byzantine and related worlds.

Peter is the author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East (2012) described ‘the most significant contribution to re-thinking the origins and causes of the First Crusade for a generation’ by the Times Literary Supplement. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015), is a global bestseller that topped the nonfiction charts in the UK, India, China, the Gulf, and beyond; it was named a Sunday Times Book of the Decade (2010-19).

Peter’s most recent monograph is The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (2023), a Financial Times, Times, Sunday Times, Le Point, and Guardian Book of the Year. Often described as a 'rockstar academic' (BBC, The Times, Der Spiegel), Peter has been called the 'first great historian of the 21st century' (DCM).