Stephen Mitchell (1948–2024)

Sadly, we have just learned that Stephen Mitchell, former president of the AIEGL from 2008 to 2012, passed away at the age of 76.

Many of us have personally experienced his wisdom and kindness, but we would like to remember him with this short portrait by Mark Humphries:

Stephen Mitchell established himself as one of the foremost epigraphers and interpreters of the history of Asia Minor in the Roman period, late antiquity, and beyond. In his Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) he integrated a wide variety of sources from epigraphy to hagiography to produce what remains, thirty years later, the gold standard study of a Roman province. More recently, his The Christians of Phrygia from Rome to the Turkish Conquest (Leiden: Brill, 2023) offered the most systematic treatment of its subject since the works of W. M. Ramsay in the 1890s. Alongside these works, and a stream of important epigraphic publications, he also produced pioneering studies of late paganism and an acclaimed general history of the Roman Empire from Diocletian to Heraclius that will shortly appear in a revised third edition.