Description
Collection consists mostly of photographs of Byzantine manuscripts with some transcriptions, several microfilm, and 1 folder
of biographical material on Paul Alexander by his wife.
Background
Paul Julius Alexander was born in Berlin, Germany in 1910. He earned law degrees in Hamburg in 1932 and Paris in 1934. In
1935 he moved to the United States and in 1940 earned his Ph.D. in ancient and Byzantine history from Harvard. His first teaching
post was at Hobart College in 1945, and from there he moved to Brandeis University in 1954, Michigan in 1958, and then Berkeley
in 1968 as professor of History and of Comparative Literature. Numerous awards included Guggenheim Fellowships in 1951 and
1965, membership in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton in 1951 and 1970, and a Senior Fellowship of the National
Endowment for the Humanities in 1974. One of the world's leading Byzantinists, he was well grounded in the classics, learned
Syriac, Arabic, Old Church Slavonic and Russian, and also worked on secular biography, patristics, iconoclasm and codicology.
His major work (and first book) was The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople: Ecclesiastical Policy and Image Worship in
the Byzantine Empire (Oxford, 1958); which was recognized as the standard monograph on the later iconoclastic period (815-843A.D.).
He died in 1977.
Restrictions
Property rights to the physical objects belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All other rights, including copyright,
are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright
and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.