Dr. Byrne arrived at Belmont in 1998 after nine years work in the state university system of Georgia. He is an historian who teaches the medieval and early modern sections of the Honors interdisciplinary humanities curriculum for freshmen and sophomores. He spent his undergraduate years  in his native Seattle at the University of Washington, where he earned degrees in business administration and history (1977). He stayed on to complete two masters degrees, in Urban Planning (1979) and history (1982). In 1982 he moved to Bloomington, Indiana where he worked on his Ph.D. in European history (1989). While at Indiana University he spent a year in Tuscany researching his dissertation on fourteenth-century cultural life. He also completed interdisciplinary certificates in Medieval Studies and in Renaissance Studies, as well as a minor in art history. For three years he served as the pre-business adviser for I.U.'s Honors Division.

After teaching for eight years in the state university system of Georgia, Dr. Byrne spent a year studying at the Institute for Higher Education at the University of Georgia. Further study was also made possible by grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities. These allowed him to explore Renaissance and Baroque architecture in Rome, early Baroque music with the Aston Magna Academy in New Jersey, Anglo-Saxon England at the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, Central Asian cultures at Harvard, and Representations of Jews in medieval Christendom at Oxford's Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

Byrne has recently contracted with ABC-CLIO to produce a single author/volume Encyclopedia of the Black Death for release in 2011. The two-volume Encyclopedia of Plague, Pestilence and Pandemics for Greenwood Press, of which he is the editor, will appear in September 2008. He published The Black Death with Greenwood Press in 2004 and Daily Life during the Black Death came out in July 2006. He has also authored ten major articles, including several based on his research into the later medieval Italian merchant culture, and over 250 book reviews and encyclopedia articles. His broad interests have led him to research and write on such diverse topics as Greco-Roman slave women, medieval war carts, Latin American exploration, American urbanization, African kings and William F. Buckley. His reviews have appeared in all of the major American journals in medieval and early modern studies, and in Canadian and British journals as well. He is currently in the process of posting to the web his huge bibliography of printed works on European wills and probate inventories. He has also prepared and posted websites on Anglo-Saxon images on the web, and on the early Renaissance artist Giotto.

At Belmont Dr. Byrne teaches two of the honors courses that satisfy the school's requirements for Honors general education. His courses cover the middle ages and the period of the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. These interdisciplinary courses are designed to present the students with learning and growing experiences that provide skills as well as information. Within a well-developed historical context students study literature, drama, art, philosophy, music and religion. Beyond reading and research his students stretch by developing websites and powerpoint presentations, participating in the creation of documentary films, performing Shakespeare and role-playing the issues of the Reformation in Germany. Past film created by the Honors 221 students were on the Salem witch trials, Louis XIV and Versailles, the Golden Age of the Netherlands, Shakespeare's England, St. Petersburg, and Medicean Florence. He believes in the value of collaborative learning, group work, portfolio development and multiple presentation techniques, as well as good old fashioned reading, writing and discussion.

Dr. Byrne has also taught Honors seminars on 19th-century Ireland, the Black Death and Early Christianity, as well as art courses on the Early Christian and Byzantine eras and Renaissance Italy. A complete listing of his publications and teaching record is available on line.