UNION ACADÉMIQUE INTERNATIONALE - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Historian of Late Antiquity
Claudia Rapp is a historian of Late Antiquity and Byzantium. She obtained her BA from the Free University Berlin and her D.Phil. from Oxford University, and subsequently held professorships in the United States (Cornell University 1992-1993, University of California, Los Angeles 1993-2011), until she took up her current post as professor of Byzantine studies at the University of Vienna.
Her research focuses on social and cultural history, often from the angle of religious history and manuscript studies. Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition, published in 2005, was re-issued in paperback in 2013. Her most recent book is Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen and Christian Ritual (2016). She has edited and co-edited several books and authored over 100 articles, encyclopedia entries and book reviews.
At the Austrian Academy of Sciences, she is the Vice-Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies in Vienna, and the Director of the Division of Byzantine Research within that Institute.
She was elected as a Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2014, as a Corresponding Member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen in 2018, Fellow of the British Academy in 2017, and Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute in 2016. Since 2015, she represents the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the UAI.
She was President of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America in 2009-2010 and 1998-1999. Since 2014, she has been the President of the Austrian Byzantine Association.
She has held many fellowships (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; All Souls College, Oxford; Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University; Dumbarton Oaks; Macquarie University), and visiting professorships (Oxford; Jerusalem; Paris; Budapest; Utrecht; Ioannina).
She is a member of numerous international editorial and advisory boards for journals and publication series, including Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Oxford Byzantine Studies, Translated Texts for Historians, Medieval Worlds, and Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik. She also works in an advisory capacity for many international institutions, Academy projects and research enterprises, including as Senior Fellow in Byzantine Studies, Dumbarton Oaks (since 2019).
She has often promoted scholarship and learning in the context of large teams, as the director of the Multi-Campus Research Group in Late Antiquity of the University of California (1999-2010), and as the Scholarly Director of the Sinai Palimpsests Project (www.sinaipalimpsests.org).
In 2015, she spearheaded the creation of the Vienna Euchologia Project (https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/byzantine-research/communities-and-landscapes/euchologia-project/) for the study of Byzantine prayer books that survive in hundreds of medieval manuscripts as sources for daily life and social history.
Job Titles:
- Professor at Rome Sapienza University
Paul Dostert is a historian, specializing in World War II and the Holocaust in particular. He obtained his state examination diploma for gymnasium education (Staatsexamen für das Lehramt am Gymnasium) at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau in 1975 and his PhD at the same university in 1984.
Shoichi Sato is a historian specializing in the Western world and, in particular, Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. He graduated in law from Chuo University (Tokyo) and he worked at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of the University of Caen (1969-71) before continuing to study the history of the High Middle Ages of the Europe during a master's and a doctorate at Waseda University (Tokyo). After a year as a resident of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences alias JSPS (1978-79), Shoichi Sato was appointed associate professor at Aïchi University in 1979. He spent two more years in France, in Paris (University of Paris -X, Nanterre with Pierre Riché, École Pratique des Hautes Études with Pierre Toubert) from 1984 to 1986. Appointed Professor at the University of Nagoya in 1987, he obtained in 1995 the title of doctor thanks to a doctoral thesis devoted to accounting documents of Saint-Martin de Tours in the Merovingian period. His thesis was published in 1997, and was honored with the Academy of Japan Prize in 2001. He ended his teaching career with the title of Professor Emeritus at Nagoya University in 2009. Shoichi Sato was elected Fellow of the Academy of Japan in December 2009 and associate member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in February 2019.
Shoichi Sato has been invited abroad by various scientific institutions and prestigious universities. In 1995, he was seconded from Japan to the CNRS (GDR0032), and also invited to the University of Provence in March 2001, to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in April 2001, to the École Pratiques des Hautes Études (4th section ) and at the Collège de France in June 2001. In October 2002, he was invited to Princeton University, to the seminar of Peter Brown.
For his seventieth birthday, in 2015, a volume entitled "Études d'histoire médiévale offertes au Pr. Shoichi Sato. Entre texte et histoire", published by de Boccard in Paris, was dedicated to him. He also had the honor of giving an imperial reading, whose title was "The Cultural Role of Monasteries in Medieval Europe", at the Imperial Palace in January 2016. He received the Japanese decoration "Order of the Sacred Treasure of the Star of gold and silver "at the imperial palace in November 2018.