He then began studying towards a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1962[1] or 1963[2] on the Euphrates frontier of the Roman Empire; his supervisor was Sir Ian Richmond.
[5] Mitford remained interested in uncovering the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, a task which took him nearly half a century to finish.
[1] He finally completed his doctoral thesis with the title "The Roman Frontier Based on the Valley of the Upper Euphrates from the Black Sea to Samosata".
[5] His efforts ultimately led to the publication by Oxford University Press in 2017 of East of Asia Minor: Rome's Hidden Frontier, which appeared in two volumes.
[7] Given to a maximum of three people a year, the award "recognises outstanding achievement that has transformed understanding of a particular subject or field of study in ... any branch of the humanities and social sciences".