Dr Ben Kolbeck

Personal Biography/Background

I have studied at Durham, Oxford (Corpus Christi College), and King's College London, where I completed my PhD on the ways in which Christian authors of the second and third centuries A.D. engaged with Roman imperial justice. After my PhD I lectured for a year at KCL before joining Cambridge as a Teaching Associate in Ancient History at the Faculty of Classics.

Specialisms

I am a Roman historian of the principate and late antiquity.

My core research concerns the identities of early Christian subjects of the Roman empire, and particularly how they navigated the relationship between their religious, social, and political loyalties. My PhD examined the ways in which Christian authors of the second and third centuries AD engaged with Roman imperial justice as a response to persecution, and I am currently working on turning this into a monograph with CUP. On a similar topic, with James Corke-Webster I recently published a joint-edited special issue of the journal Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum exploring Justin Martyr and his negotiation of Roman imperialism, which can be read here: https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/zach/28/1/html. Other work-in-progress includes studies on the presentation of Roman military figures in the Christian martyr acts, and on the processes by which narratives of persecution were produced from communal trauma in the ancient world.

Beyond this, I am interested in Roman governance—particularly the administration of justice, and the role of voluntary associations—and the place of the Roman army in society.