Associate Professor John Pryor

	BA (Adelaide), PhD (Toronto), FAHA
	Phone: +61 2 9351 2840
	Address: Room N306 A20 - John Woolley
	Email: john.pryor@sydney.edu.au

Associate Professor John Pryor was awarded First Class Honours in History for the B.A. at Adelaide in 1968. He graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1974 and in the same year took up a lectureship in History at the University of Sydney. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1980 and to Associate Professor in 1988. Since 1999 he has been seconded half-time to the Centre for Medieval Studies. He retired from the University in January 2008 and was appointed to a half-time position as Director of the Centre and Co-Ordinator of its programmes for three years, 2008-2010.

Professor Pryor’s interests have developed over the years, although they have always been focussed on the history of the Mediterranean region in the Middle Ages. Initially they were concerned with economic history and in particular with trade and commerce. His Ph.D. thesis was on the operation of the form of partnership known as “commenda”, as revealed by the notarial records of Marseilles in the thirteenth century. From there his interests developed in the 1980s into the history of the Crusades and of maritime history and naval warfare.

Professor Pryor has published five books, including, notably, Geography, technology, and war : studies in the maritime history of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 (Cambridge University Press, 1987) and The age of the dromon : the Byzantine navy ca 600-1204 (Brill, 2006). He has also written over 60 articles and chapters in books and has had one volume of collected studies published by Variorum and is about to have another published. In 2006 he edited and published Logistics of warfare in the age of the Crusades, a volume of papers that were the product of a Workshop convened by him at the Centre for Medieval Studies which was attended by 12 scholars he invited from around the world. His next major work will be a maritime and naval history of the Crusades to be entitled Crusading by sea.

Within the Centre, Professor Pryor co-ordinates (and contributes sessions to) the courses MDST2601 The written record of the Middle Ages and MDST2607 Medieval literary and artistic genres. He also teaches the two courses MDST2608 The First Crusade and MDST2608 Crusade and Jihad.