John Van Antwerp Fine, Jr.

John V. A. Fine Jr. is an American historian and professor of history at the University of Michigan.

He was born in 1939 and grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. His father, John V.A. Fine (1903–87), was Professor of Greek History in the Classics Department of Princeton University. His mother, Elizabeth Bunting Fine, was also a classicist and taught Latin and Greek at Miss Fine’s School.

John Jr.’s undergraduate and graduate training was at Harvard University, where he studied Byzantium, the Balkans, and medieval Russia. He earned his Ph.D. in 1968 and began teaching at the University of Michigan in 1969.

His academic interests range from theology and the history of Christianity to Byzantium and the medieval and modern Balkans. His publications have become standard in the field, notably his surveys of the Medieval Balkans (1983 and 1987). He has also revolutionized the way scholars understand the Bosnian Church (first published in 1975; republished in England in 2006), showing that it was not heretical.

In 2006, Fine published a study of notions of ethnicity in Croatia from the medieval period to the nineteenth century titled When Ethnicity Did not Matter in the Balkans. In 2009, John K. Cox of North Dakota State University reviewed it largely positively, noting some points of criticism. The same year, Neven Budak of the University of Zagreb gave it a largely negative review, noting some positive aspects.

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