Ethan Schmidt

Areas of interest

Medieval Byzantine literature and historiography, Byzantine rhetoric, urban space, collective memory, ekphrasis, manuscript culture, reception of antiquity in Byzantium, Komnenian culture and society, intellectual history, and legacy of Byzantium.

Education

• MSc, Late Antique, Byzantine, and Islamic Studies, University of Edinburgh
• BA, Medieval History, University of St. Andrews

Biography

Ethan Schmidt is a born-and-raised New Yorker, bibliophile, writer, and, most importantly, an aspiring Byzantinist who is pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD in Byzantine History and Literature at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University. His doctoral research is concerned with ekphrases of Constantinople and its monuments, especially in their capacity both as expressions of the self-confident “civic humanism” of the literati in the years before the Fourth Crusade, and as poignant and emotionally charged texts designed to evoke the splendors and antique heritage of a world irrevocably lost in the aftermath of that disastrous event.