Dr Victoria Leonard - Postdoctoral Researcher

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, Austrian Academy of Sciences, University of Vienna.

My role within the ERC-funded CONNEC 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.

I specialise in ancient history, digital humanities, and gender and women, especially gender-based violence. I have published articles in the journals Vigiliae Christianae, Studies in Late Antiquity, and Gender & History. My monograph, In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past, is under contract with Routledge. This explores Paulus Orosius’s historiographical approach to the deconstruction and reconstruction of a narrative of the past through the prism of Christianity.

I am a Research Associate at the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. I am an Ambassador for Cardiff Women’s Aid.  I have written for The Guardian and The Times Higher Education, and I have contributed to BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking.

I am a founding member, former co-chair, and steering committee member of the Women’s Classical Committee (UK), an organisation that advances equality and diversity. I co-founded the international outreach initiative in History, #WCCWiki, that aims to improve the representation of women on Wikipedia. Through this effective crowd-sourced activism, #WCCWiki has edited or created more than 450 Wikipedia articles on women historians.

I have taught across the disciplines of Ancient History, Classics and Archaeology, from ancient material culture and early writing systems in Egypt (3200 BC), to ancient historiography and its reception in the Middle Ages (eighth century CE). I have convened modules in material approaches to the ancient world and ancient religion, and I have held teaching positions at Bristol and Cardiff universities.

More information about my research is available via PURE

Email - Victoria.leonard@rhul.ac.uk

Twitter - @tigerlilyrocks

Websites - 

https://royalholloway.academia.edu/VictoriaLeonard

https://ics.sas.ac.uk/people/research-associates

http://www.connectedclerics.com/

https://womenalsoknowhistory.com/individual-scholar-page/?pdb=2593