Vasileios Syros
Visiting Professor of Social Thought and in the College
Dr. Vasileios Syros did graduate work in medieval and early modern history, and Islamic and Jewish philosophy and history of ideas at the Universities of Freiburg i. Br., Marburg and Heidelberg. He earned his Ph.D. in Medieval and Early Modern History from the University of Heidelberg in 2003. His Ph.D. dissertation is a study of the Reception of Aristotle's Political Thought in Marsilius of Padua's Defensor pacis. He also completed post-doctoral work in philosophy of religion, and the history of medieval Arabic and Jewish political thought at the University of Munich, the Sorbonne and the École Pratique des Hautes Études.
From 2006 to 2008 Dr. Syros worked as a Junior Research Fellow of the Academy of Finland and taught medieval and early modern history and history of political thought at the University of Helsinki. During the academic year 2007/2008, Dr. Syros taught as a Maître de conférences invité at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and was invited to work at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He has have also lectured on topics related to medieval and early modern intellectual history and political thought in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. Since 2008 Dr. Syros has been teaching at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In 2009 Dr. Syros was recently awarded a docentship in the History of Political Thought by the University of Helsinki.
Dr. Syros has published extensively in major peer reviewed journals (History of Political Thought, Revue des Études Juives, Bulletin de philosophie médiévale, Lias: Sources and Documents Relating to the Early Modern History of Ideas, and Redesriptions). His work has appeared in numerous edited volumes published by leading academic presses such as Brill, Brepols, and de Gruyter. His first book was published by Brill in 2007, www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=210&pid=26599. His ongoing projects include two monographs: 1) “Causa legis effectiva”: Marsilus of Padua’s Political Thought as a Bridge between the Ancients and the Moderns (under contract with the University of Toronto Press); 2) The Protean Art of Politics: Early Modern Jewish Political Thought and Skepticism. In addition, in July 2009 he was appointed editor-in-chief by the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies for the series Medieval Confluences: Studies in the Intellectual History and Comparative History of Ideas of the Medieval World.
