Youval Rotman is a social and anthropological historian of the Byzantine Mediterranean world. Within this framework he has worked on slavery, captives, ransoming of captives, cultural and social relationships between religious communities of different faith, forms of sanctity and insanity, psychological processes of transformation, and religious conversion.
He is the author of Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (Harvard University Press, 2009:,http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674036116 ), published first in French (Les Belles Lettres, 2004), which ascribed a decisive role to slavery in the historical development of the early medieval Mediterranean. His second book: Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium: the Ambiguity of Religious Experience (Harvard University Press, 2016, http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057616 ) studies different forms of social abnormality and their sanctification in the Byzantine Near East as a motor of social change.
Youval Rotman is an Associate Professor of History at the department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University and can be reached at yrotman@post.tau.ac.il