Walter Kaegi


Walter Emil Kaegi is a historian and scholar of Byzantine History, professor of history at the University of Chicago, and a Voting Member of The Oriental Institute. He received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1959 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1965. He is known for his researches on the period from the fourth through eleventh centuries with a special interest in the advance of Islam, interactions with religion and thought, and military subjects. Kaegi is also distinguished for analyzing the Late Roman period in European and Mediterranean context, and has written extensively on Roman, Vandal, Byzantine and Muslim occupation of North Africa. He is known also as the co-founder of the Byzantine Studies Conference and the editor of the journal Byzantinische Forschungen.

1970s-1980s

Kaegi is currently involved in several projects, notably on Muslim raids into Byzantine Anatolia. He is planning an investigation of the role of Byzantine concepts of strategy in the emergence of concepts of strategy in early Modern Europe. Kaegi's current research interests also include Byzantine commercial relationships with the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of the Islamic conquests. Additionally, he is preparing an essay on Byzantium in the seventh century for an Oxford University Press handbook to Maximus the Confessor. An avid reader of Arnold J. Toynbee in his formative years, Kaegi is writing a reassessment of Toynbee as a Byzantine historian.