Marlena Whiting Author

Max Ritter is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He received his PhD in Byzantine Studies from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, where he later continued as a postdoctoral researcher. He also held two research fellowships in Istanbul, which allowed him to engage deeply with the city’s historical landscape and integrate the perspectives of local scholars into this book. His research focuses on building culture and lived religion in Byzantium, drawing on both textual sources and material evidence. Most recently, his research shifted towards Byzantine conceptions of nature, notably focusing on marine environments.

Elodie Turquois completed a doctorate in Classical Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford on materiality and visuality in Prokopios of Kaisareia and has published widely on Prokopios and the Buildings. She is an independent researcher whose work explores Late Antique literary aesthetics, the manuscript transmission of the Buildings; she uses narratology, stylistics, and reception theory to approach ancient texts. Her most recent research investigates the reception of Constantinople and its late antique tradition in the writings of 16th-c. French travellers.

Marlena Whiting has a doctorate in Late Antique Archaeology from the University of Oxford, with a specialism in travel infrastructure and the built environment of monasticism and pilgrimage. Currently a researcher and lecturer at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, she has held visiting fellowships at CBRL Amman and ANAMED in Istanbul, and has worked on archaeological projects in Jordan, Syria and Spain. Her research applies interdisciplinary approaches from social sciences (network analysis, spatial access theory) to material and textual evidence to understand historical contexts from a phenomenological perspective, with a focus on religious life and gendered lived experience.