Personal Statement
I am an intellectual historian of late antiquity. I graduated with a BA in History from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2017, an MA in Classical Languages from the University of Chicago in 2018, and a PhD in History from Trinity College, Cambridge (again) in 2023. I am now a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool, where I am writing a history of radical and counter-radical ideas about wealth inequality in the late antique Mediterranean.

Research Overview
My current work examines how late Romans understood, and challenged or protected, the unequal distribution of wealth and property during and after the emergence of Christianity as an imperial religion (c.300–600). While the economic history of late Roman inequality is thriving, our understanding of how late Romans thought about inequality remains dominated by the patristic discourse on voluntary philanthropy—a practice that legitimised inequality as the economic arrangement that made it possible to give to the poor. As John Chrysostom (one of early Christianity's most socially compassionate preachers, sometimes still described as a proto-socialist) put it, God allowed many to be found in poverty for the spiritual advantage of the rich giver. Our consensus as historians is that late Romans did not develop a truly 'radical' tradition of economic thinking; that consensus feeds into the assumption, so prevalent in some modern theories of inequality, that the human history of contesting inequality on the structural level began in earnest with industrialisation.

I aim to extend that history backwards by a millennium. At the conceptual heart of my project is the sixth-century deacon Agapetus, who published a popular Greek text proclaiming that the Roman emperor, 'by taking from the rich and giving to the poor, must turn inequality to equality'. Agapetus's egalitarianism—assembled from the Gospels, Plato, and the patristic philanthropic discourse—proves that it was possible for late Romans to produce serious, structural critiques of inequality and to propose political solutions to it that went far beyond the limited voluntary giving so encouraged in the homiletic evidence. In light of this evidence, I am re-reading the mainstream philanthropic discourse of late antiquity as a hegemonic discourse that justified inequality and suppressed radical counter-discourses, in various local contexts. I am presently publishing a series of articles that map patristic techniques of justification and the (often subaltern) currency of egalitarianism, such as among the labouring classes of fifth-century Antioch, across the late Roman Mediterranean.

I recently submitted my first monograph, Political Debate in the Age of Justinian I. Based on my doctoral research, this monograph reconstructs how Romans in sixth-century Constantinople reused the emperor's and each other's words to apply political pressure to their régime. Across a wide range of Greek and Latin sources, in manuscript, epigraphic, and architectural forms, my monograph argues that sixth-century political culture was characterised by the creative, tactical, and competitive use of discourse to mobilise the expectations of imperial subjects.

I am broadly concerned with the big narratives and concepts that we use to make sense of the late Roman world, so my research interests span a series of subfields, from the economic history of late Roman labour, the political and intellectual history of autocracy, to the cultural history of asceticism. I retain an abiding interest in the methodological and comparative implications of my work. I have co-authored a historical analysis of corporate power in the constitutionalisation of the EU Internal Market and have held roles at two autism research institutions, where I applied my theoretical work in the history of power to the equalisation of power relations between researchers and their neurodivergent subjects (an issue where much progress remains to be made).