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• Biography

  Lewis Read is currently a Research Assistant on the ERC project RELEVEN, hosted at the Department of History of the University of Vienna. His research specialises in medieval Armenian book production, transmission, and circulation across the Eastern Mediterranean between the ninth and eleventh century, with a particular focus on historical, palaeographical and philological analysis of Armenian source material in conversation with Greek and Christian Arabic book culture, as well as on the application of digital tools for the study and preservation of Armenian manuscripts.

  Lewis earned his PhD in History from the University of Vienna (2025), during which he undertook further training in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and automated semantic analysis through machine learning from the University of Oxford and the University of Vienna. Prior to this, he received his MA in Medieval History (2019) and MLitt in Middle Eastern History and Arabic (2020) from the University of St Andrews.

  At Vienna, Lewis is currently teaching as part of the History bachelors programme, offering courses on the socio-cultural, economic, and political history of the medieval Middle East.
• Curriculum Vitae

  Education

  May 2025 | PhD in History, Department of History, University of Vienna.

  • Thesis: Commemorating Saint Eudoxios: Armenian Chalcedonian Translators and the Byzantine Empire in the Eleventh Century

  • Supervisor: Prof. Tara Andrews.

   

  September 2020 | Master of Letters Middle Eastern History and Arabic, University of St Andrews.

  • Dissertation: Fostering in Early Medieval Armenian Sources

  • Supervisor: Professor Timothy Greenwood

   

  June 2019 | Master of the Arts (Honours) in Medieval History, University of St Andrews.

   

  Further Education and Training

  August 2024 | Natural Language Processing in Python. Course: Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS), University of Oxford.

  June 2023 | Byzantine Greek. Course: International Byzantine Greek Summer School (IBGSS), Trinity College Dublin.

  January – September 2022 | TEI-XML Encoding. Course: TEI-XML Text Encoding and Analysis, University of Vienna. 

  October 2020 – June 2021 | Islamic Numismatics. Course: Numismatics and Economy- Islamic Coins as a Source for Political, Urban, Legal and Economic History, Islamic Material Culture Initiative 2020/21, Universität Bonn, Ludwig-Maximilian Universität Munich, Universität Hamburg. 

   

  Employment

  September 2021 – ongoing | ERC RELEVEN Project Research Assistant (Universitätsassistent) with Responsibility for Armenian and Eastern Christian Source Material (PI: Prof. Tara Andrews), Department of History, University of Vienna.

  
  July 2018 – July 2019 | Quantitative Data Analyst, ‘Escaping ISIS: Internally Displaced Persons in Iraq’ (PI: Dr Andrew Marin), University of St Andrews.

  
  September 2016 – September 2017 | Project Intern, Conference Administration and Logistics, Declaration for a Shared Humanity, (PI: Prof. Mario Aguilar), Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics, University of St Andrews.