Peter Charanis

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Peter Charanis (1908 - March 23, 1985) was a well known scholar of Byzantium and a professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University. Dr. Charanis had long be associated with the Dumbarton Oaks research library.

Dr. Charanis, who was born in Lemnos, Greece immigrated to the New Jersey, United States in 1920, received his bachelor's degree from Rutgers and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin where he studied under Alexander Vasiliev. He continued his studies as a post graduate in the University of Brussels where he studied under another eminent Byzantinist, Henri Gregoire. From 1936 to 1938 he participated in Gregoire's seminar where he met his future wife Madeleine Schiltz and befriended the likes of Nicholas Adontz and Paul Wittek. According to Charanis himself, during his stay in Brussels he acquired a profound interest in the Armenians. That interest bore abundant fruit in various studies, notably The Armenians in the Byzantine Empire (Byzantinoslavica, 1961) and A Note on the Ethnic Origin of Emperor Maurice (Byzantion, 1965). Charanis also spent some time at the University of Salonika in Greece, and upon his return to the United States joined the Rutgers faculty in 1938 becoming a Voorhees Professor of History in 1963. At that time Byzantine Studies was still at its infancy in the United States. Charanis persuaded the history department to begin a course in Byzantine Studies, which eventually became one of the most popular courses in Rutgers. From 1964 to 1966 he served as chairman of the university's history department, retiring in 1976.

[edit] Selected bibliography

An important short chronicle of the fourteenth century, Byzantion 13 (1938)
Byzantium, the West and the origin of the First Crusade, Byzantion 19 (1949)
On the Social Structure and Economic Organization of the Byzantine Empire in the Thirteenth Century and Later Byzantinoslavica 12 (1951)*Ethnic Changes in the Byzantine Empire in the Seventh Century, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 13 (1959)
The Armenians in the Byzantine Empire, Byzantinoslavica 22, 1961, Repr. Lisbon, 1963, London, 1972
Observations on the Demography of the Byzantine Empire, XIII.International Congress of Byzantine Studies Oxford, 1966