Anthony Kaldellis is professor of classics at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, and he is the host of the podcast Byzantium & Friends.
“Once again, Kaldellis has forced us to rethink much of what we thought we knew—in this case, the millennium-long role of Western Europe in the concept of ‘Byzantium.’ Kaldellis demonstrates that ‘Byzantium’ was a project of European self-fashioning, a way for Western elites to claim for themselves the Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian past while denying those same legacies to the peoples we call the Byzantines. This is an innovative but accessible study that showcases a scholar with an extraordinary command of the sources.” -- George E. Demacopoulos, Fordham University “With his important and extremely exciting Phantom Byzantium, Kaldellis continues to redefine the field of Byzantine Studies. Kaldellis builds admirably on his project to provide a comprehensive critique of the centuries-long denial of the Roman identity belonging to the people modern scholars call Byzantines. He explores how western European superiority, notions of imperialism, and racism came together in the early twentieth century to create peculiarly dismissive attitudes among Byzantinists toward the texts, artworks, and people they study.” -- Edward Watts, University of California San Diego