John Thomas, Ph.D., Byzantine History, received his doctoral degree at Harvard University in 1980. He is an internationally recognized specialist in the history and institutions of the Byzantine Church. His Private Religious Foundations in the Byzantine Empire, published by the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in 1987, is a study of the role privately-endowed churches and monasteries played in the Byzantine Empire. He is also the author, along with Angela Hero, of Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, a five-volume annotated translation of all the Byzantine Monastic typika (foundation charters) and testaments that was published by Dumbarton Oaks in 2000. In pre-publication review, this collection was cited as "the most important work ever written on Byzantine monasticism." He has contributed to international symposia on Byzantine monasticism and related subjects in Northern Ireland (1992), Israel (1998), Germany (2002), and Italy (2004). Since 2005, he has been participating in a research project on pre-modern foundations sponsored by the Humboldt University's Department of Comparative History in Berlin and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. He has been Adjunct Assistant Professor at PAOI since 2005 with teaching interest in the Byzantine Church, the Byzantine Monastery, and Orthodoxy and Islam.