Dr. Joe Glynias

Biography

Joe Glynias works and teaches at the intersection of Islamic, Byzantine, and Eastern Christian history in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean Middle East. In particular, he focuses on the cultural transmission of texts and ideas, as well as the agents of this transmission and the historical moments in which these actions occurred. Prior to joining Yale, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2022 to 2025. Glynias’s forthcoming book, contracted with Princeton University Press, examines the massive translation movement undertaken in Byzantine Antioch during the 10th and 11th centuries, where hundreds of Greek Christian texts were translated into Syriac and Arabic. He is also working on additional monograph-length projects that consider the canonization within the Christian Arabic canon law during the 12th century and the influence of multilingual Christians living under Muslim rule on the developing Byzantine legal tradition. His longer-term project is concerned with the translation between Arabic and Greek of philosophical and scientific traditions that developed during the Greco-Arabic translation movement in Abbasid Baghdad. Glynias’s research has been supported by several fellowships, including a Junior Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks and a Dodds Fellowship from Princeton. He has published on a wide range of topics, including Byzantine monasticism, Greco-Arabic translation, Arabo-Greek astrology, Syriac manuscripts, Byzantine sigillography, and Islamic coinage.

Research Interests