Union Académique Internationale

Vice-President (2021-2025)

Board member (2019-2021)

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.

In 2015, her work was recognized with Austria’s highest academic honor, the Wittgenstein-Award, which has enabled her to assemble a team of scholars for the joint investigation of Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency, a multi-disciplinary exploration of geographical, cultural and social mobility.

For a full list of publications, research activities, recognitions and positions of responsibility, see: https://www.byzneo.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/mitarbeiterinnen/akademisches-personal/rapp-claudia/