Books by Professor of History

This book deals with the ways empires affect smaller communities and vice versa. It raises the question how these different types of community were integrated into larger imperial structures, and how tensions between local and central interests affected the development of the post-Roman West, Byzantium and the early Islamic world.

Mercury's Wings marks a milestone as the first-ever volume devoted to ancient communications. Its eighteen wide-ranging essays by art historians, Assyriologists, Classicists and Egyptologists explore communications as a powerful vehicle not just for the transmission of information, but also for the conduct of religion, commerce, diplomacy, culture and more.