Skip to main content
What types of page to search?

Alternatively use our A-Z index.

Robin Whelan

Dr Robin Whelan
BA, MSt, PhD

Research

My first book, Being Christian in Vandal Africa: the Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West (University of California Press, 2018) analyses conflicts over orthodoxy in the Vandal kingdom, the successor to Roman rule in North Africa (c. 439-533 CE). It argues that disputes between Nicene (‘Catholic’) and Homoian (‘Arian’) Christians in Vandal Africa retained the sophistication and socio-political consequences evident from the notoriously passionate (and often violent) ecclesiastical conflicts of the later Roman Empire. My work on this project (which originated in my PhD thesis) has also led me to publish articles and book chapters on North African church conflict; ‘Arianism’ as a heresy; debate and dialogue in late antiquity; ethnicity and Christianity; the ‘secular’ in the post-Roman West; and Vandal royal women.

My second project, ‘The Christian State in Late Antiquity’, funded by an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship (2020-2023), considers how Christian ideology transformed the representation and practice of governance across the Mediterranean world in late antiquity. This is far from an understudied topic (!), but my project is novel in shifting attention from emperors and bishops to the ‘secular’ administrators who served late Roman, post-Roman and Byzantine regimes. I am currently trying to finish a book, provisionally entitled Official Religion: Serving the Christian State in Late Antiquity, which traces how conceptions of divine providence, ascetic practices, and interactions with ecclesiastical institutions created new—and often rather ambivalent—expectations of these men and their political agency. I have also written several articles and essays on the representation of Christian administrators in late ancient letter collections and church histories, as well as their involvement in mediating disputes over orthodoxy in the fifth-century Eastern Roman Empire. Alongside this individual project, I have recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity on ‘Shaping Christian Politics in Late Antiquity’ with Richard Flower and Meaghan McEvoy; we are currently preparing an edited volume on Christian Political Cultures in Late Antiquity.

Research grants

The Christian State in Late Antiquity: Officials, Identities, and Religious Change, c. 400-600CE

ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL

September 2020 - August 2023