John Langdon

Biography

John S. Langdon, Ph.D., Senior Continuing Lecturer, UCLA Department of History; Emeritus Head, Department of History and Social Sciences, The Marlborough School, Los Angeles; and Associate, UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies;  UCLA Ph.D. in Byzantine and Late Antique History, 1978.  Selected publications:  Byzantium’s Last Imperial Offensive in Asia Minor:  John III Ducas Vatatzes’ Crusade against the Turks, 1222-1231 (New Rochelle, NY, 1992);  “Byzantium’s initial encounter with the Chinggisids:  An introduction to the Byzantino-Mongolica,” in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 29 (1998), pp. 95-140;  “The image of thirteenth-century Anatolian-Byzantine Basileis as warriors,” in Text and Tradition:  Studies in Greek History and Historiography in Honor of Mortimer Chambers, edd. Ronald Mellor and Lawrence Tritle (Claremont, CA, 1999), pp. 303-328; “Twilight of the Byzantine Lascarid Basileia in Anatolian exile, 1254-58:  Continuity and change in imperial geopolitical strategy,” Viator, 34 (2003), pp. 187-207.   I am a specialist in Byzantine civilization during the epoch of the Crusades;  my doctoral fields included—in addition to Byzantine and Late Antique Studies—Roman History and Early Western Medieval History.  In the past, I have taught Roman, Western Medieval, and Greek History at Occidental College.  At UCLA I have offered both parts of Byzantine History (now 116A and 116B), as well as the three parts of our Roman History series:  Regnal/Republican Rome, the Roman Empire, and Late Antiquity (History 114A, 114B, 114C respectively);  Early Western Medieval History (119A); Western Civilization to 843 A.D. (History 1A); Western Civilization from 843 to 1715 A.D. (History 1B);  two parts of the History of the Ancient Mediterranean World series:  Greece (now History 112B) and Rome (now History 112C);  and, finally, Pro-Seminars surveying World War II (History 97C/191C), Early Central Asia and the Mongols (History 97A/191A), the Late Antique “Fall” of the Roman Empire (History187A/191A), and the Christian Roman Empire, Holy War, and Crusade (History 191A).  At Marlborough, where I served on the faculty from 1979 to 2014, I offered, inter alia, the Honors Global Survey of Pre-Modern World History to 1500 C.E.;  the intensive Modern European History Survey in its Global Context for Advanced Placement;  and a senior elective on the History of the Cold War and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire.