Joe Glynias
Assistant Professor of History
Dr. Joe Glynias works and teaches at the intersection of Islamic, Byzantine, and Eastern Christian history in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean and Middle East. In particular, he focuses on the cultural transmission of texts and ideas, the agents of transmission, and the historical moments in which these actions occurred. Prior to Yale, Dr. Glynias was Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2022-2025).
Glynias’s first book, contracted with Princeton University Press, considers the massive translation movement undertaken in Byzantine Antioch in the 10th and 11th centuries, in which hundreds of Greek Christian texts were translated into Syriac and Arabic. He is also working on two additional monograph-length projects: the first considers the canonization of Christian Arabic canon law in the 12th century by multilingual Christians living under Muslim rule who were influenced by the developing Byzantine legal tradition. The second, longer-term project is concerned with the translation from Arabic to Greek of the Arabic philosophical and scientific traditions that had developed as a result of the Greco-Arabic translation movement in Abbasid Baghdad.
Glynias’s work has been supported by a number of fellowships including a Junior Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks and a Dodds Fellowship at 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.