Skip to content

Professor Garth Fowden FBA

Intellectual currents and imperial horizons in the first millennium CE, from Augustus to Avicenna, Central Asia to the Atlantic. Emergent Islam in its late antique context

Elected 2015

Fellow type
UK Fellow
Year elected
2015
Sections
Theology and Religious Studies, Classical Antiquity
Website
http://www.divinity.cam.ac.uk/directory/garth-fowden

Garth Fowden was the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths in the University of Cambridge from 2013 to 2020. After his DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford, Fowden held research fellowships at Cambridge and taught briefly at Groningen, and subsequently on several occasions as a visiting professor at Princeton. But the greater part of his career (1985-2013) was spent working on late antique and early Islamic history at the National Research Foundation in Athens. He is now composing a wide-ranging synthesis of his work in these traditionally separate areas of scholarly activity, within the framework of a new historical periodisation, the First Millennium from Augustus to Avicenna.

Current post

Institute of Historical Research, National Research Foundation, Athens Senior Research Director

2013 -

Past appointments

University of Cambridge Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths

2013 - 2020

Publications

Abraham or Aristotle? First Millennium Empires and Exegetical Traditions

Garth Fowden - Published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press

An Inaugural Lecture by the Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths Given in the University of Cambridge, 4 December 2013

Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused

Garth Fowden - Published in 2013 by Princeton University Press

Qusayr 'Amra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria

Garth Fowden - Published in 2004 by University of California Press

Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity

Garth Fowden - Published in 1994 by Princeton University Press

The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind

Garth Fowden - Published in 1993 by Princeton University Press

Related Fellows

Professor Ingrid De Smet FBA

Renaissance and Early Modern intellectual culture, especially in France and the Low Countries; sixteenth and early-seventeenth century French literature; Neo-Latin Studies; the Republic of Letters; the Classical tradition

ingrid-de-smet.jpg

Dr Sebastian Brock FBA

Syriac Studies

sebastian-brock.jpg

Dame Averil Cameron FBA

Late antique and Byzantine studies

averil-cameron.jpg

Sign up to our email newsletters

Preferences

I'm particularly interested in updates on: