Staff profiles

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos studied Pharmacy (MPharm), University of Athens, and Classics & Ancient History (BA), King’s College London. He then read Late Antique & Byzantine History and Literature, University of Oxford (MSt), and took his doctorate in the History of Medicine at King’s College London (2015). He then held a Wellcome Research Fellowship, King’s College London (2016-2019), and a Wellcome Lectureship in History of Medicine (permanent post), University of Edinburgh (2019-2022), before joining the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Athens as an Associate Professor of History of Science in September 2022. He is also an Honorary Fellow in History at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh.

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos has published extensively on late antique, Byzantine, and early Renaissance medicine and pharmacology, also offering editions and English translations of previously unpublished texts; the reception of the classical medical tradition in the Middle Ages; medical lexicography; and palaeography, including the first descriptive catalogue of the Greek manuscripts in the Wellcome Library. His ground-breaking monograph, Innovation in Byzantine Medicine: The Writings of John Zacharias Aktouarios (c.1275-c.1330) (Oxford University Press, 2020), has been awarded the Prize for Young Historians by the International Academy of the History of Science. His recently published long pathway article on ‘Cross-Cultural Transfer of Medical Knowledge in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Introduction and Dissemination of Sugar-Based Potions from the Islamic World to Byzantium’ in Speculum (2021) has been chosen as ‘Article of the Month’, November 2021, by the Mediterranean Seminar and was awarded the 2022 Estes Prize by the American Association for the History of Medicine. He is also editor of four volumes, including the 700-page Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen.

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos has received funding from the A. G. Leventis Foundation, Alexander S. Onassis Fundation, AHRC, and the Wellcome Trust. He has been invited to review articles and books for 23 international peer-reviewing journals and publishers (Europe, USA), and major research project applications in four European countries. He is Series Editor of Global Histories of Premodern Health and Healing, co-Editor of the Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies (UK), and Contributing Editor of the History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals (USA).

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