Personal Biography/Background

I have studied at Durham, Oxford (Corpus Christi College), and King's College London, where I completed my PhD on the ways in which Christian authors of the second and third centuries A.D. engaged with Roman imperial justice. After my PhD I lectured for a year at KCL before joining Cambridge as a Teaching Associate in Ancient History at the Faculty of Classics.

Specialisms

I am a Roman historian of the principate and late antiquity.

My core research concerns the identities of early Christian subjects of the Roman empire, and particularly how they navigated the relationship between their religious, social, and political loyalties. My PhD examined the ways in which Christian authors of the second and third centuries AD engaged with Roman imperial justice as a response to persecution, and I am currently working on turning this into a monograph with CUP. Other work-in-progress includes studies on the presentation of Roman military figures in the Christian martyr acts, and on the processes by which narratives of persecution were produced from communal trauma in the ancient world.

Beyond this, I am interested in Roman governance—particularly the administration of justice, and the role of voluntary associations—and the place of the Roman army in society.

 

Articles:

Forthcoming, 2024: ‘Read it in Rome: miracles, documents, and an empire of knowledge in Justin Martyr’s First Apology’, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum.

Forthcoming, 2024: ‘Pontius’ conscience: Pilate’s afterlives and apology for empire in fourth-century Antioch’, The Journal of Late Antiquity.

2022. ‘A flagrant fabrication? Deconstructing the tradition of collegia fabrum as voluntary fire-brigades in the Roman empire’, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 71/3: 337–361.

2018. ‘A foot in both camps: the civilian suppliers of the army in Roman Britain’, Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal 1/1. (https://doi.org/10.16995/traj.355).

Chapters:

Forthcoming. ‘The early Church and war: the witness of Tertullian’, in I. Polinskaya, A. James, and I. Papadogiannakis (eds.), Religion and War from Antiquity to Early Modernity. London: Bloomsbury.

Reviews:

‘P. McKechnie, Christianizing Asia Minor’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 71/3: 607–609. (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022046920000366).