Robin Whelan

Academic Interests

Recent Commons Activity

About

I am Senior Lecturer in Mediterranean History at the University of Liverpool. I am a cultural historian of late antiquity and the early middle ages. My research and teaching focus on the later Roman Empire and its early medieval successors, with a particular interest in issues of religious diversity, social identity, ethnic communities, and political culture. My first book, Being Christian in Vandal Africa (University of California Press, 2018) is about the consequences of church conflict in post-Roman Africa (modern-day Tunisia and Algeria). My current project considers the Christian identities and entanglements of imperial and royal officials in late antiquity.

Before coming to Liverpool in January 2018, I was Hulme Humanities Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (2014-2018), and a temporary Lecturer in Early Medieval History attached to various Oxford colleges (2016/17).

Education

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (PhD in Classics, 2014)

University College, Oxford (MSt in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, 2010)

Merton College, Oxford (BA in History, 2009)

Work Shared in CORE

Articles

Book reviews

Other Publications

‘Shaping Christian politics in late antiquity’, special issue of Journal of Late Antiquity 15.2 (Fall 2022), co-edited with Richard Flower and Meaghan McEvoy.

‘Missing queens: gender, dynasty, and power in Vandal Africa’, Gender & History 34.1 (2022): 3-21. Open Access at https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12528

‘After Augustine, after Markus: the problem of the secular at the end of antiquity’, Early Medieval Europe 29.1 (2021): 12-35. Open Access at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/emed.12447

‘Ethnicity, Christianity, and groups: Homoian Christians in Ostrogothic Italy and Visigothic Spain’, in Erica Buchberger and Yaniv Fox (edd.) Inclusion and exclusion in Mediterranean Christianities, 400-800, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 25 (Turnhout, 2019), 167-98.

‘An ascetic state? Fashioning Christian political service across the early sixth-century Mediterranean’, Studies in Late Antiquity 2.3 (2018): 385-418.

‘Mirrors for bureaucrats: expectations of Christian officials in the Theodosian Empire’, Journal of Roman Studies 108 (2018): 74-98. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435818000254

Being Christian in Vandal Africa: the politics of orthodoxy in the post-imperial West, The transformation of the classical heritage 59 (Oakland, CA, 2018). https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520295957

‘Surrogate fathers: imaginary dialogue and patristic culture in late antiquity’, Early Medieval Europe 25.1 (2017): 19-37.

‘African controversy: the inheritance of the Donatist schism in Vandal Africa’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 65.3 (2014): 504-21.

‘Arianism in Africa’, in Guido Berndt and Roland Steinacher (edd.) Arianism: Roman heresy and barbarian creed (Aldershot, 2014), pp. 239-55.

Senior Lecturer in Mediterranean History

University of Liverpool