Caroline Humfress

Biography

Professor Caroline Humfress joined the School of History in September 2015, having taught previously at the University of London (Birkbeck), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University. Her main research interests focus upon law and legal practice in comparative historical contexts, from Late Antiquity to the present day. She has published widely on the period c.200-c.600AD and is currently finishing a monograph for Oxford University Press: Multi-legalism in Late Antiquity. She is presently co-editing the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law: the first project of its kind in the field of Comparative Ancient Legal History, working with an international team of scholars specialising in the fields of Ancient Greek, Roman, Indo-European, Near-Eastern and Chinese Law. Some of her current research also explores approaches from the disciplines of law and legal studies, anthropology and sociology and she is delighted to be joining the new University of St Andrew’s Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research. Professor Humfress has also worked on the history of empires, recently co-editing a volume on Law and Empire: Ideas, Practices, Actors; in addition to researching early Christian history and ecclesiastical law. She is especially interested in studying law, religion and the state ‘in action’: how did individuals and groups attempt to ‘work’ the systems and structures within which they lived and what can this tell us about contemporary societies today, in global contexts? She has taught a wide range of courses from archaic Greece to contemporary intellectual and political thought. In particular she has presented a number of Undergraduate and Postgraduate modules on the religious, cultural and political history of Late Antiquity and the early Middle ages, as well as on the history of ideas (Classical, Medieval and Modern).

Research Interest

Intellectual and political History