Personal profile

Personal profile

Victoria Leonard is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Postdoctoral Researcher in Late Ancient History, as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Connected Clerics. Building a Universal Church in the Late Antique West (380-604 CE)’, at Royal Holloway, University London and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH-ÖAW), Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften).

Victoria’s role within the project involves compiling data on clerical connections and using adapted digital tools to examine and visualize evolving clerical networks in the late ancient and early medieval western Mediterranean.

Victoria's research focuses on four main areas: i) social network analysis and digital humanities; ii) ancient and early medieval historiography; iii) ancient religion, particularly conflict and coercion; iv) and gender, sexuality, and gender-based violence in antiquity.

Victoria has published articles in the journals Vigiliae Christianae, Studies in Late Antiquity, and Gender and History. She has written for The Guardian and The Times Higher Education, and she has appeared on BBC Radio 3. Her monograph, In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past, is under contract with Routledge. The work explores Paulus Orosius’s historiographical approach to the deconstruction and reconstruction of a narrative of the past through the prism of Christianity.

Victoria is also a Research Associate at the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is a founding member, former co-chair, and steering committee member of the Women’s Classical Committee (UK). She teaches across the disciplines of ancient history, archaeology, and religious studies. She has convened modules in material approaches to the ancient world and ancient religion, and has held teaching positions at Bristol and Cardiff universities.

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 5 - Gender Equality
  • SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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