István Perczel (Central European University)

Prof. dr. István Perczel

István Perczel is Professor at the Department of Medieval Studies of the Central European University (CEU). He teaches classes relevant to Byzantine, Eastern Christian and Syriac studies as well as to Late Antique philosophy. His research interests include Late Antique Patristics and philosophy, especially the study of the Pseudo-Dionysian Coprus and of the Origenism of the fifth-sixth centuries, Byzantine theology, Syriac manuscripts and the history of the Syrian Christians of India. Prof. Perczel is co-founder of the Centre for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS) at CEU, as well as of the Association for the Preservation of the Saint Thomas Christian Heritage in Ernakulam, Kerala. From the year 2000 to the present he has been directing and overseeing, in co-operation with scholars from the University of Tübingen and the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, an ongoing field project designed at surveying, digitizing, ant cataloguing the manuscripts of the Syrian Christians of South India.

The proposed internationalizations project can be seen as closely complementary to an ongoing team research project entitled ‘The Caucasus and Byzantium from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages’, which is currently conducted at CEMS under the co-directorship of Prof. Perczel.

István Perczel acted as visiting professor at École Pratique des Hautes Études, 5e section, in Paris (1995), at Saint Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, Kottayam, Kerala, India (2002), and at École Pratique des Hautes Études Sociales in Paris (2004 and 2010). Since 2006, he is recurrent visiting professor at Ivane Iavakishvili State University, Tblisi, Georgia. He was research fellow at the Catholic University of Leuven (1992/1993), at Dumbarton Oaks (summer 1996), in the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1999), of the Onassis Foundation (1999), in the Instituto Trentino di Cultura (2002/2003), and in the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2009/2010).

For more information, see also his academic homepage and the page of the Centre for Eastern Mediterranean Studies.