Dr. Ritter received his PhD in the field of Byzantine Studies in 2017 from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, and he is a research associate at the same university. His domains of expertise are the political and economic history of Late Antiquity and the Middle Byzantine period. He is the author of Zwischen Glaube und Geld: Zur Ökonomie des byzantinischen Pilgerwesens (4.–12. Jh.) (Mainz: RGZM press, 2019) and has published many articles on Byzantine pilgrimage and travel but also on other research subjects like Byzantine Paphlagonia and Venetian Cyprus.
As part of the DFG-funded project “Procopius and the Language of Buildings,” he prepared the historical component of an interdisciplinary commentary co-authored with Élodie Turquois and Marlena Whiting (forthcoming with Routledge). At ANAMED, he is aiming to extend his research on Justinian’s Constantinople to the subsequent periods until the tenth century by studying the building culture of emperors and the elite in this city in times of turmoil.