Jeffrey Burton Russell

Career

Russell held a number of academic posts, moving to the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara until his retirement. He taught History and Religious Studies at Berkeley, Riverside, California State University, Sacramento, Harvard, New Mexico, and Notre Dame.

Russell published widely, largely on medieval European history and the history of Christian theology. His first book was Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (1965). He is most noted for his five-volume history of the concept of the Devil: The Devil (1977), Satan (1981), Lucifer (1984), Mephistopheles (1986) and The Prince of Darkness (1988), all published by Cornell University Press.

In Inventing the Flat Earth (1991) he argues that 19th century anti-Christians invented and spread the falsehood that educated people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat. As one writer summarizes, "Russell also examined a large selection of textbooks and found those written before 1870 usually included the correct account, but most textbooks written after 1880 uncritically repeated the erroneous claims in Washington Irving, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Russell concludes that Irving, Draper and White were the main writers responsible for introducing the erroneous flat-earth myth that is still with us today."

Russell wrote two books on the history of the notion of Heaven: A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (1997), which deals with the period from around 200 B.C. up to Dante, and Paradise Mislaid (2006), which takes the story up to the early 21st century.

Honors and accolades

• Fulbright Fellow
• Harvard Junior Fellow
• Guggenheim Fellow (1968)
• Fellow, Medieval Academy of America (1985)
• Faculty Research Lecturer, Academic Senate Award, University of California, Santa Barbara 1990-91.