Steven Bowman

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Steven B. Bowman is an American scholar who studies Greek and Jewish relations over the last thousand years, with a focus on Byzantium and the Holocaust. He is a professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati, teaching courses on ancient and medieval Jewish history and modern Israel.

He earned a BA in history from the University of Massachusetts in 1964 and a PhD from Ohio State University in 1974 on Byzantine Jewry during the Paleologue period. He joined the University of Cincinnati in 1980 and became a full professor in 1990.

Bowman is the author of The Jews of Byzantium, 1204-1453 (1985). He also wrote about Greek Jews during World War II, including The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945, which critics praised as a careful and thorough study of Greek Jewry’s darkest years. In 2011 he completed an Annotated Translation of Sepher Yosippon, published in 2012 as the first Hackmey Jewish Classics book at Harvard.

He is editor in chief of the Sephardi and Greek Holocaust Library, which has published Greek Holocaust memoirs and other works. Since 1971 he has received many awards, including three Fulbright grants and two NEH awards, plus numerous honors from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. He has held fellowships at Yad Vashem, Oxford, and the Hebrew University, and did work on Sefer Yosippon during sabbatical leave.

Bowman has lectured widely around the world on Greek Jews and their relations with Greeks, and he is interested in Greek and Jewish nationalism. He has been a visiting professor at New York University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a visiting lecturer at Haifa University and UC San Diego. In 2010 he became a visiting professor at Wolfson College, Cambridge to study Genizah fragments of Sefer Yosippon.

He has been a member of the Medieval Academy of America since 1963, and has served in leadership roles at the University of Cincinnati. He sits on several editorial boards and has contributed articles to many encyclopedias, including The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium and the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.