Vasileios Syros

Vasileios Syros (Greek: Βασίλειος Σύρος) is a Greek historian of political thought, Director of the Early Modern Greek Culture Program at the Medici Archive Project in Florence, Italy. His main research and teaching interests lie in the comparative examination of the medieval and early modern Christian, Islamic, and Jewish political traditions. A second cluster of his research looks at intercultural contacts between pre-modern Europe and non-Western societies and polities, especially the Mughal and Ottoman Empires. Syros also works on the comparative study of diverse models of leadership and cultural diplomacy. He has also taught comparative political theory and cross-cultural leadership at Beijing University and Nankai University (China), Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea), Waseda University (Japan), and Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (Kazakhstan).

Career

Vasileios Syros earned his doctorate in medieval and modern history from the University of Heidelberg in 2003. He also studied Jewish intellectual history at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg and did post-doctoral work on Arabic philosophy at the University of Munich and at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne as well as on Mughal history at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India.

Syros was a Junior Fellow at the Academy of Finland (2006–2008) and Senior Fellow at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. From 2008 to 2011 he taught as Visiting Assistant Professor of Social Thought at The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and was appointed Martin Marty Center Senior Fellow at The Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. From 2012 to 2017 he was Academy of Finland Senior Fellow and in 2014 he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Jyväskylä. From 2014 to 2018 he directed the research program “Political Power in the Early Modern European and Islamic Worlds” and previously served as Principal Investigator for the project “Giovanni Botero and the Comparative Study of Early Modern Forms of Government” (2012–2017) under the auspices of the Academy of Finland as well as project manager of the collaborative network “Eurasian Empires, Public Space/Sphere, and Collective Identities at the Threshold of Modernity” under the aegis of the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS–HS) (2014–2015).

He has taught at Stanford University, McGill University, The University of Chicago, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris). In 2017/2018 he was appointed Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Visiting Professor and Descartes Senior Fellow at the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University.

Syros has received a number of research grants, fellowships and awards, including from Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Waseda Institute for Advanced Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study, and the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.

Syros is part of the Management Committees of COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action CA18129 – Islamic Legacy: Narratives East, West, South, North of the Mediterranean (1350–1750) and of CA18140 – People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean (1492–1923). He has also been a member of various international research networks, such as “Christians, Jews and Muslims in Medieval and Early Modern Europe” (University of Helsinki), Neutrality: Neutrality, Neutralism, and Nonalignment in International Relations at Waseda University, and the Orthodoxy and Human Rights Scholars Project under the auspices of Fordham University and Henry Luce Foundation. His most recent position is that of the Director of the Early Modern Greek Culture Program at the Medici Archive Project in Florence, Italy

Syros is the editor of the book series Edinburgh Studies in Comparative Political Theory and Intellectual History (Edinburgh University Press) and Medieval Reconfigurations: Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the World (Brepols) and serves on the editorial boards of various book series (e.g., Global Perspectives on Medieval and Early Modern Historiography) and journals, including Republics of Letters (Stanford University), Comparative Political Theory, and Conatus–Journal of Philosophy.

Published Works

Syros has published Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of Ancient and Medieval Traditions of Political Thought (University of Toronto Press, 2012); Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua (Brill, 2007); Well Begun is Only Half Done: Tracing Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Medieval Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish Sources (ACMRS, 2011), and, more recently, Μεσαιωνική ισλαμική πολιτική σκέψη και σύγχρονη ηγεσία [Medieval Islamic Political Thought and Modern Leadership], Greek translation by Nikos Tagkoulis. Foreword by Cary J. Nederman (Athens: Papazissis Publishers, 2020). His articles have appeared in international peer-reviewed journals, including Renaissance Quarterly, Viator,Journal of Early Modern History, Intellectual History Review, Medieval Encounters, Journal of World History, Philosophy East and West, History of Political Thought, and Revue des Études Juives. His work has been translated into various languages, including Bosnian, Bulgarian, German, Greek, Romanian, and Russian.