Dr Elizabeth Fowden

Elizabeth Key Fowden’s work examines religious encounter as expressed, above all, in architectural and artistic transformations. 

Sparked by an early interest in classical and Christian imagery in renaissance Italy, Fowden studied Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and Princeton University, specialising in late antique history and material culture in the Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia.

Her PhD thesis, supervised by Peter Brown at Princeton University and later published as The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (Berkeley 1999), examines religious, political, and architectural crosspollination in late antique and early Islamic Syria and Mesopotamia.

In her current book project, The Parthenon Mosque, Fowden applies her interest in Islamic reformulation of the classical and Christian inheritance to the early modern conjunction of Greek, European and Ottoman views of Athens’ most celebrated building.

Elizabeth Fowden is Senior Researcher in the European Research Council funded project (2016-2021), Impact of the Ancient City, led by Principal Investigator Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. The project re-examines the impact of the ancient, Greco-Roman city on subsequent urban history in Europe and the Islamic world, investigating both the urban fabric and urban ideals.

Fowden has also lectured and supervised on late antique and early Islamic history at Cambridge (Middle Eastern Studies and Divinity) and the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London.