Haldon, John F.

Foreign Fellows

Elected: 2024

Email: jhaldon [@] princeton.edu

Profile

John Haldon is a fellow of the British Academy and Director of the Climate Change and History Research Initiative at Princeton University. His research focuses on the history of the medieval eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire, in particular 7th – 12th c; on pre-modern state systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds; and on the impact of environmental stress on societal resilience in pre-modern social systems. His most recent work has focused in this last area and through Princeton’s Climate Change and History Research Initiative he has established an effective centre for building transdisciplinary research initiatives integrating historical, archaeological, palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic research. The aim of the Initiative is to mobilize resources in the social/historical and environmental sciences to determine how an understanding of past societal resilience and sustainability (or their absence) in the face of both environmental and climatic challenges and hazards can inform contemporary responses to problems of a similar nature and magnitude. The project (a) challenges reductionist models of past social responses to environmental challenges often deployed in public and academic debate and (b) seeks to test a series of hypotheses about the roles of social and cultural capital, belief systems and baseline inequalities in determining and configuring such responses.