George Demacopoulos

George E. Demacopoulos is Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies. He is Co-Founding Director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center and Co-Founding Editor of the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies.

A native of Tennessee, Dr. Demacopoulos came to Fordham in 2002 after receiving his PhD in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Along with Aristotle Papanikolaou, Dr. Demacopoulos co-founded Fordham's Orthodox Christian Studies Center, which is the only research-university Center of Orthodox Christianity in the United States. The Center facilitates, funds, and publishes scholarly work related to the Orthodox Christianity broadly understood. On behalf of the Center, Drs. Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou have won a number of prestigious grants, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Luce Foundation, the British Council, and Leadership 100.

Dr. Demacopoulos specializes in the History of Christianity for Late Antiquity, the early Medieval West, and Byzantium. He also works broadly in the field of Orthodox Christian Studies and serves as the co-founding editor of the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies.

Over the past few years, his research has been focused in three general areas: (1) Christian East/Christian West in the Middle Ages (2) the application of critical theory (especially postcolonial theory) to the study of Orthodox Christianity and (3) early Byzantine hymnography.

His current book projects include an examination of the presentation of violence in Byzantine hymnography and an assessment of the contested legacy of Byzantine Christianity in the modern Orthodox Christian world.