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Professor Stephen Mitchell

Emeritus Professor

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Professor Stephen Mitchell on 30 January 2024.

Many within and beyond the academy will be familiar with Prof. Mitchell’s outstanding contribution to ancient scholarship, his ability to inspire, his energy and unassuming leadership.

At the University of Exeter we have been particularly fortunate to have him among us for a decade as a colleague, teacher, mentor and friend. In 2002, he took up the position of Leverhulme Professor of Hellenistic Culture, moving here from the University of Swansea. Bringing his knowledge especially of Ancient Türkiye to the Department of Classics and Ancient History, he set up the Centre for Hellenistic Culture and Society and an ambitious project on pagan monotheism. Soon, he also became the Head of Department. He introduced innovative undergraduate and MA courses and gave inspirational guidance to doctoral students and colleagues. He was consistently modest, thoughtful and helpful to all under his watch.

His deep interest in the history of Türkiye from ancient times to the present began when he was already a student at Oxford, where he received his DPhil in Classics in 1974. Since then, Prof. Mitchell’s research – focusing particularly on Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique Anatolia and incorporating history, epigraphy and archaeology – has made him one of the leading scholars of the ancient world.

Prof. Mitchell’s ability to bring together multiple fields of inquiry is evident in his many publications, which covered Asia Minor alongside the history of early Christianity and the late Roman Empire. His last book in which all these subjects are brought together is his monumental study of early Christianity in central Anatolia:  The Christians of Phrygia from Rome to the Turkish Conquest (Brill 2023).

His commitment and deep interest in a holistic approach to understanding ancient societies and their landscapes are manifest in his international initiatives and his leadership roles, including serving as President of the British Epigraphy Society and of the Association Internationale d’Épigraphie Grecque et Latine. He also served as the Chair, and most recently in 2023 was elected as Vice-President, of the British Institute at Ankara.

Professor Mitchell’s major contributions to the study of ancient history as well as to academic co-operation between Britain and Türkiye have been widely recognised. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2002, received an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2006, and was awarded the prestigious Gustave Schlumberger Prize by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris in 2020.

These life achievements in no way summarise all that Stephen was and what he brought to all who had the privilege of engaging with him. Those who had a chance to accompany him on study trips to Türkiye – where he and his wife Matina Mitchell, an astute innovator in her own right, took time to share their passion and knowledge – will know his ability to open before them new ways of understanding the world, the ancient and the contemporary.

Stephen Mitchell combined wisdom of judgement with humanity and kindness. He will be greatly missed by all those who knew him.

If you would like to add your remembrances of Prof. Stephen Mitchell, which will be passed on to his family, along with those of other colleagues, students and friends, please add them here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WNhTxp8gG9Ux_8PYkhi9OYEQcKwxoVCVr0Zq6-enf_E/edit?usp=sharing

Overview

I was Leverhulme Professor of Hellenistic Culture from 2002 in 2011 and am now emeritus during an active retirement. I was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002 and served for some years on its Council. Most of my published work has been concerned with Asia Minor in antiquity, explored through texts, inscriptions and archaeology, with a particular emphasis in recent years on religious and cultural history. The bench-mark publication of my earlier career was Anatolia. Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor (2 vols. OUP 1993). During my time at Exeter I directed an AHRC-funded research project on Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire, which led to two important conference volumes, including One God. Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (CUP 2010) and two CUP monographs written by the project's post-doctoral and doctoral researchers, Peter Van Nuffelen and Anna Collar. I received an honorary doctorate in 2006 from the Theology Department at the Humboldt University in Berlin and this has led to close involvement in an ongoing project to study the history of early Christianity in Asia Minor, part of the Berlin TOPOI initiative. In due course I plan to write a book which will follow the non-Pauline tradition of the earliest Christian communities in Asia relating them to their Jewish and pagan contexts. I was a founder member and first director of Exeter Turkish Studies, and am now Honorary Secretary of the British Institute at Ankara, which provides the focal point - and some of the funding - for British academic research in Turkey in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Another major project has been to prepare the corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions of Ankara. The first volume has been published, and the second, which was advanced during a semester at the University of Cologne in 2012, is in preparation. At Exeter I wrote A History of the Later Roman Empire 285-641 (Blackwell 2007, second edition in preparation).

I currently live in Sheffield, where my wife has opened an artisan bakery, which makes extraordinary bread and cakes. Retirement has allowed a little more time for reading novels, and provided flexibility away from the constraints of professional academia.

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