In the United States, Sevcenko has also taught and researched at the University of California, Columbia, and the University of Michigan, as well as spending eight years at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard's prestigious research center in Byzantine and Medieval Humanities located in Washington, D.C.

Besides his current research at Harvard, Sevcenko also advises four graduate students on their Byzantium-related theses, as well as teaches seminars on Byzantine texts and a popular freshman seminar on the fall of Constaninople.

"As I saw it," Sevcenko says, recalling the reasoning for his career choice, "classical philology was an activity in which you were more like a curator in a wonderful museum, rather than a person who can count on the excitement of discoveries with any chance for success."

Treasure Hunting

"If you are after discoveries, you are better off as a Byzantinist," he continues. "All you have to do is read unpublished manuscripts."

Sevcenko, as it turns out, has done much more, and in doing so he has won a reputation as an unusually broad-based scholar not only with skills in analyzing the Byzantine Greek and Latin texts, but also in linguistics, understanding the nature of manuscripts, and historical analysis.

"One of his great strengths is that he's recognized as an all-arounder more than any other Byzantinist," says Giles Constable, director of Dumbarton Oaks.

Sevcenko would probably be pleased with this description, as he explains, "I dabble in various aspects of the Byzantine history and literature," adding, "The easiest way of combining them is through intellectual history--first, in the sense of what went into the heads of the Byzantine elite." Having spent many years analyzing the first tier and its complexities. Sevcenko says that he is now studying the thinking of the so-called "second tier" of citizens below the elite--the sort "that determines the character of an epoch."

In attacking these sorts of problems, the scholar has almost never taken a "survey" approach like many scholars in the field, as attested by Sevcenko himself and his colleagues. "What's odd is that he covers a vast range of material, and he almost always comes at it from a particular source," says Constable.

This often means studying a certain text and trying to draw broad conclusions--as Sevcenko has done with the chronicle of Basil's life, which has dominated much of his research for the last decade.

He says the manuscript was "botched" in the first go at this 300 years ago--particularly in the identification of the emperor, and not a ghost-writer, as its author.

But as he gets ready to finish his translation and editing of the manuscript, Sevcenko describes textual evidence that disproves 300 years of commentary.

"I still may be wrong," says Sevcenko, summing up his approach not only to the problem, but to academics in general. "But I am at least talking common sense.