Dr Lea Niccolai

My research explores how philosophy, religion, and reading practices shaped socio-political change in the later Roman Empire. My first monograph examined how sacred texts were used to legitimise imperial and episcopal authority, showing, through the lens of Constantine and Julian, how late antique leaders contested the control of meaning as a means of securing trust. My current book project, supported by a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Classics, develops this interest by asking how ‘interpretation’ itself came to be understood as a concept and practice capable of generating intellectual and political authority in the third and fourth centuries CE.

My recent collaborative projects include a cluster issue, co-edited with Dr Dawn LaValle Norman, on the spiritual meaning of male hair across pagan, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions between the third and seventeenth centuries; and a volume, co-edited with Dr Giulia Maltagliati, offering the first systematic study of how Greek and Roman authors conceptualised and communicated ignorance, uncertainty, and the unknown. I am currently co-editing with Dr Benedek Kruchió a special issue introducing ‘Interface Interpretation’, a new framework for analysing how interpreters connect apparently distinct bodies of knowledge and derive authority from those connections.

I am broadly interested in the history of the late antique Mediterranean and Near East, and particularly in questions of methodology underpinning late Roman historiography and legislation; cultural interaction between the Greco-Roman world and the ancient Near East; Hellenistic Judaism and its late antique legacy; theories of allegory and midrash; and the history of Neoplatonism and its socio-cultural impact.