Affiliated Senior Research Fellow September 2021 to September 2026

Professor Vasileios Syros is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Military History and Conflict Studies at the United Service Institution of India (USI), India’s oldest and foremost tri-service think tank (est. 1870) for research into national security, strategic leadership, and military history. He is also an Honorary Adjunct Fellow at the National Maritime Foundation (NMF), India’s premier think tank for maritime research, Visiting Research Professor, D.B. Bandodkar Chair in Political Economy, Visiting Research Professorship Programme (VRPP), Goa University, and a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. His teaching and research interests revolve around the history of medieval and early modern political thought, cross-cultural leadership, and Indian strategic thought. He has previously been a visiting fellow at the Institute for European Global Studies in the fall of 2018 co-operating with Prof. Ralph Weber in a project about “The Value of Comparison: Global History and Comparative Political Theory” (SNF Scientific Exchanges). He returns to the Institute for European Global Studies as an affiliated Senior Research Fellow for the period 2021–2026, supported by Finnish mobility funding for international cooperation, to pursue a project entitled “Comparative Political Theory and the Challenges of the 21^st Century.”

Syros has published Medieval Islamic Political Thought and Modern Leadership (Papazissis, 2020) (in Greek), Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of Ancient and Medieval Cultures and Traditions of Political Thought (University of Toronto Press, 2012); Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua (Brill, 2007); and Well Begun is Only Half Done: Tracing Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Medieval Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish Sources (ACMRS, 2011). His work has appeared in a number of international peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of World History, Philosophy East and West, Renaissance Quarterly, Journal of Early Modern History, Intellectual History Review, Medieval Encounters, History of Political Thought, Viator, and Revue des Études Juives. From 2014 to 2018 he directed the research program “Political Power in the Early Modern European and Islamic Worlds” and previously served as Principal Investigator for the project “Giovanni Botero and the Comparative Study of Early Modern Forms of Government” (2012–2017), which have both been funded by the Academy of Finland. Syros is the editor of the Edinburgh Studies in Comparative Political Theory and Intellectual History (Edinburgh University Press) and Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the World (Brepols). He also serves on the editorial boards of various academic journals, including Comparative Political Theory and Republics of Letters (Stanford University).