Nicola Holm

I am a historian of late antiquity, particularly the Greek East and am currently a Marie Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warsaw. I work broadly on the intersections of authority, how the Roman imperial government operated in the Late Roman period, and the urban dynamics of major cities in the late antique period. I am particularly intereste in how authority is depicted in the Greek historiographical traditions, both in secular and ecclesiastical literature, and how this is reflected in modern accounts of the late antique period. Prior to my MSCA Fellowship, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Research on Ancient Civilizations at the University of Warsaw. 

I received my PhD in Classics and Ancient History from Exeter in 2024, and my thesis, The Sons of Constantine and Ecclesiastical Politics was supervised by Professor Richard Flower and Professor Morwenna Ludlow. My doctoral work was supported by the A. G. Leventis PhD Studentship. My thesis saw me working closely with a range of sources both ‘secular’ and ‘patristic’, including the works of bishops such as Hilary of Poitiers and Athanasius of Alexandria. I am currently preparing a monograph, The Transformation of Imperial Policy Towards the Church (249-380 CE) which expands the thematic and temporal parameters of my doctoral work, in order to situate imperial policy relating to the Church, Christians and Christian groups within a longue duree in order to gain a more holistic understanding of how this policy looked and acted. 

I have published in the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies (Open Access, June 2026) on the presentation of Constantinian dynasticism in the Greek ecclesiastical writers, which offered a careful reanalysis of how this is presented in the original Greek texts. I have also published on the Emperor Julian's public image in the Routledge Handbook to Identity in Byzantium. I have a further series of commissioned chapters in edited olumes in preparation or under reiew, ranging in themes from a close analysis of Julian's Letter to the Athenians, to the subersion of imperial ceremony at Church Councils in the fourth century, to the dynastic significance of the city of Sirmium, and the 'retrospective orthodoxy' of the Emperor Constans. I am also a co-editor, along with Richard Flower, Nic Baker-Brian, and Will Lewis of Constantinian Representations: Ideology, Power, and Propaganda (under contract, LUP). 

I am originally from Australia, and recieved my BA (2014) and MPhil (2017) from the University of Queensland.