John Mulhall

Bio

John Mulhall is a historian of the medieval Mediterranean whose research explores the history of science and the intersection of science and religion in the Latin, Greek, and Arabic traditions. Above all, his interests concentrate on the movement, circulation, and transformation of knowledge among the Islamicate, Byzantine, and Latin Christian worlds.

He received his Ph.D. in Byzantine History from Harvard University, an M.St. in Ancient History from Oxford funded by the Lionel Pearson Fellowship, and a B.A. in Ancient Greek from the College of William and Mary. Mulhall has been a Tyler Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks and the Andrew W. Mellon Junior Faculty Fellow at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute. For the 2025–2026 academic year, he has received the Rome Prize Fellowship of the American Academy in Rome.

Mulhall’s first book project, The Republic of Translators: Latin, Greek, Arabic and a New Age of Science, Philosophy, and Theology in the Twelfth Century, offers the first monographic history of the translation activity from Greek and Arabic into Latin in the twelfth century. By situating this translation activity within the history of Mediterranean knowledge exchange, The Republic of Translators proposes a new model for understanding one of the most transformational moments in world intellectual history.

In addition, Mulhall also works on the history of disease and medicine in late antiquity and the middle ages, and has a particular interest in uniting his textual research with new advances in microbiology, genetics, and archaeoscience. His most recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Late Antiquity, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and The Washington Post.