Personal Statement
I am a historian of the Roman world in late antiquity. I research and teach the political, cultural, and religious history of the later Roman Empire and its early medieval successors. In particular, I explore the Christianisation of the Roman world which followed the Emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312 CE, and the impact of Christian beliefs, practices, and institutions on what we might consider ‘secular’ aspects of political and social life. My first book, Being Christian in Vandal Africa (University of California Press, 2018) was about the consequences of theological debate and church conflict in post-Roman Africa (modern-day Tunisia and Algeria). I have just finished a project on the ways in which Christian ideology reshaped the representation and practice of governance in late antiquity. My new book, Serving the Christian State in Late Antiquity (available Gold Open Access from Cambridge University Press, 2026), considers the Christian identities and entanglements of imperial and royal officials in the Roman world from the late fourth to the late sixth centuries. I am currently working on gender and political service, political emotions, concepts of polarisation and consensus, and developing pedagogical roleplaying games.

I have spent most of my life on Merseyside: I grew up on the Wirral and moved to Liverpool in January 2018 to join the Department. But my journey in between was slightly longer than a trip across the Mersey: I first did a BA in History and then an MSt in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies in Oxford, before moving to Cambridge for a PhD in Classics (which included Erasmus doctoral study at the Universität zu Köln). I then went back to Oxford to take up a research fellowship at Brasenose College and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), with a stint as a temporary Departmental Lecturer in Early Medieval History at Balliol College, Brasenose College and St Peter’s College thrown in for good measure.

I am very happy to supervise MA and PhD dissertations and mentor post-doctoral projects on late ancient, early medieval, and early Byzantine topics. If you’d like to work with me, please send me an e-mail and we can talk about your project.

I am the founder of the Liverpool Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages research group (LLAMA). For more information on our activities, visit https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/histories-languages-and-cultures/research/liverpool-late-antiquity-early-middle-ages/

Research Overview
My first book, Being Christian in Vandal Africa: the Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West (University of California Press, 2018) analyses conflicts over orthodoxy in the Vandal kingdom, the successor to Roman rule in North Africa (c. 439-533 CE). It argues that disputes between Nicene (‘Catholic’) and Homoian (‘Arian’) Christians in Vandal Africa retained the sophistication and socio-political consequences evident from the notoriously passionate (and often violent) ecclesiastical conflicts of the later Roman Empire. My work on this project (which originated in my PhD thesis) has also led me to publish articles and book chapters on North African church conflict; ‘Arianism’ as a heresy; debate and dialogue in late antiquity; ethnicity and Christianity; the ‘secular’ in the post-Roman West; and Vandal royal women.

My second project, ‘The Christian State in Late Antiquity’, funded by an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship (2020-2023), considers how Christian ideology transformed the representation and practice of governance across the Mediterranean world in late antiquity. This is far from an understudied topic (!), but my project is novel in shifting attention from emperors and bishops to the ‘secular’ administrators who served late Roman, post-Roman and Byzantine regimes. This project has resulted in my second book, Serving the Christian State in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which traces how conceptions of divine providence, ascetic practices, and interactions with ecclesiastical institutions created new—and often rather ambivalent—expectations of these men and their political agency. I have also written several articles and essays on the representation of Christian administrators in late ancient letter collections and church histories, as well as their involvement in mediating disputes over orthodoxy in the fifth-century Eastern Roman Empire. Alongside this individual project, I have co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity on ‘Shaping Christian Politics in Late Antiquity’ with Richard Flower and Meaghan McEvoy; we are currently preparing an edited volume on Christian Political Cultures in Late Antiquity (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2026).