Walter Beers is a social historian of the late antique eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on Syriac literature and rural Christianity. His PhD research, conducted in the Department of History at Princeton University, focused on the Syriac historian John of Ephesus and examined the socioeconomic forces behind the development of the future Syrian Orthodox Church in sixth-century southeastern Turkey and the Hauran. While at the HCMH, he will be writing a monograph based on his dissertation, and conducting further research grounded in the archaeological evidence for late antique rural monasticism.