Victoria Leonard

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Victoria Leonard is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University. She joined the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, as a Research Associate in 2017, and became a Research Fellow in 2020. She is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London. She has held fellowships at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, and Fondation Hardt, Geneva.

Victoria was a Postdoctoral Researcher as part of the European Research Council 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). Her role within the project involved 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.

In 2023, Victoria was a David Walker Memorial Fellow at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Her project explored the reception of Paulus Orosius's Historiae in early print cultures in early modern Europe. 

Victoria’s research focuses on the late antique and early medieval western Mediterranean, with a special interest in: data collection; ancient and early medieval historiography; ancient religion, particularly Christianity; receptions of patristic texts in early modern print cultures; and gender, sexuality, violence, and theories of the body in antiquity.

Victoria has published articles in the journals Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vigiliae Christianae, Studies in Late Antiquity, and Gender and History. Her monograph, In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past, was published by Routledge in January 2022. With Laurence Totelin and Mark Bradley, Victoria has edited the volume Bodily Fluids in Antiquity for Routledge (2021). She has written for The Guardian, the Church Times, and The Times Higher Education, and she has contributed to BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking. She is a member of the Editorial Board for the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, published by Oxford University Press, for the book series Gendered Violence. A Cultural History of the Gendering of Violence from Late Antiquity through the Late Nineteenth Century, published by Brepols, and for Women in Ancient Cultures, published by Liverpool University Press. Victoria is currently serving on the Council for the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies (2024-27).

From 2020 until 2024, Victoria was co-chair, with Elena Giusti, of the CUCD Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She is a founding member, former co-chair, and former steering committee member of the Women’s Classical Committee (UK). Victoria organises #WCCWiki for the WCC UK which seeks to improve the representation of classicists (broadly conceived) who identify as women or non-binary on Wikipedia. #WCCWiki was awarded Wikimedia UK's Partnership of the Year prize in 2022. Victoria is a founding member of the International Orosian Network.

Victoria is interested in supervising PhD projects in late antiquity, early Christianity, gendered violence in antiquity, late antique historiography, Orosius and the Historiae adversus paganos, and gender, violence, women, and theories of the body in antiquity. Victoria is happy to collaborate with external stakeholders and in supervisory teams at Coventry University and other Higher Education Institutions across the UK.