John Langdon

John Langdon

Senior Continuing Lecturer

Email: jlangdon@ucla.edu

Office: 7280 Bunche Hall

Phone: 310-825-4388

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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.

Field of Study

Byzantine and Late Antique History

Subfield

Roman History, Early Western Medieval History