Robert Somerville

Robert Eugene Somerville (born 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is the Ada Byron Bampton Tremain Professor of Religion and Professor of History at Columbia University, New York. He has taught at Columbia since 1969, except for a year at the University of Pennsylvania (1976–1977)

Somerville did his doctoral work under Stephan Kuttner at Yale University. He has published widely on the high medieval history of the papacy and of canon law. He is internationally recognized as an authority on medieval church councils. With the publication of his 2011 book, he has published completely all the sources relating to the councils of Pope Urban II.

Somerville is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and of the Commission internationale de diplomatique. He is a corresponding member of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munich, and of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He has received numerous awards, including two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowships.

In 2012, the Catholic University of America Press published a festschrift in his honor Canon law, religion, and politics: Liber amicorum Robert Somerville, edited by his former students Uta-Renate Blumenthal and Anders Winroth, and also by Peter Landau.

He currently lives in the Upper West Side on Manhattan, New York, and his son, Gregory Somerville, is a rising senior at Columbia College.