Alexandre Roberts

Byzantium and the Middle East, Greek and Arabic philology, classical traditions, intellectual history, history of science and religion, history of chemistry

Alexandre Roberts is a Byzantinist, Graeco-Arabist, and intellectual historian specializing in Byzantine and medieval Middle Eastern scholars and their engagement with ancient intellectual traditions. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Chemistry and Its Consequences in Byzantium and the Islamic World—a project that investigates technical treatises of the sort typically called alchemical, as well as philosophical, theological, and legal sources and the Greek and Arabic manuscripts that contain them. His first book, Reason and Revelation in Byzantine Antioch (University of California Press, 2020), was on the eleventh-century Arabic-speaking, Byzantine-Christian scholar Abdallah ibn al-Fadl of Antioch as a window onto the engagement with ancient Greek, Byzantine, and Islamicate thought that took place in and around Antioch-on-the-Orontes during the pivotal century of Byzantine rule over Northern Syria. Links to his publications can be found at alexandreroberts.github.io.

• Ph.D. History, University of California, Berkeley, 2015
• M.A. History, University of California, Berkeley, 2011
• A.B. Physics, Princeton University, 2008