Peter Brown’s now famous biography of Augustine, first published in 1967, established his reputation as an authority. Since then he has made dozens of other contributions to history and religion in the western world. He has been the recipient of multiple awards, almost twenty honorary degrees from institutions around the world, and numerous fellowships for his writing. In 2008 he won the Kluge Prize from the Library of Congress, and in 2011 he was awarded the coveted Balzan Prize. He is currently Rollins Emeritus Professor of History at Princeton.

In Part 1 of this interview, Brown talks with our editor Ioannis Mylonopoulos about how his boredom with Augustine led to the invention of the field of “Late Antiquity”, about utopian views of the past, and why he focused on writing on the West.

Part 2 is now available here.

※We would like to thank Dimitri Gondicas and Carol Oberto for hosting the interview in the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University.