Howard-Johnston was a junior research lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1966 to 1971 and also held a junior fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks in 1968–1969. Later, he was University Lecturer in Byzantine Studies and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, until his retirement in 2009. He was briefly interim President of the same college in the mid-2000s.[citation needed]
He was a member of Oxford City Council (1971–76) and Oxfordshire County Council (1973–77, 1981–87). At the time of his re-election in 1973 as an Oxford councillor in the Oxford South ward, where he garnered 43.7% of the vote, he was a member of the Labour Party.
Personal life
Howard-Johnston is married to the novelist Angela Huth and has a step-daughter, Candida Crewe, daughter of Quentin Crewe, and a daughter, Eugenie Teasley.
Books
(with Nigel Ryan) The Scholar & the Gypsy: Two Journeys to Turkey, Past and Present (1992)
(ed. with Paul Hayward) The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the contribution of Peter Brown (1999)
Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford 2010)
Historical Writing in Byzantium (Heidelberg 2014)
(ed.) Social Change in Town and Country in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (Oxford 2020)
