My interest in networks in history derives from learning about projects that colleagues at other institutions were doing using social network analysis, including Julia Hillner’s Migration of Faith at the University of Sheffield and David Natal’s Connected Clerics at Royal Holloway University of London.
I began to experiment in one of my final-year undergraduate modules by attempting to map out the networks of Libanius, a late-fourth century teacher of rhetoric from Antioch. This led to a UROS (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme) project at the University of Lincoln with Annabelle Mansell, called Invisible Agents: Networks of Learning in Late Antiquity in 2021 (see also this blog post: ‘What’s in a name?‘). In 2023 and 2024, I also led some workshops on social network analysis on a second year module called Digital Heritage at the University of Lincoln.
In 2024, I received a Leverhulme International Fellowship to develop this work further in a project called The Unnamed.