Professor Emma Loosley Leeming

Emma studied for a BA in History and History of Art at the University of York (1991-1994), where she specialised in the Medieval and Renaissance periods. She then worked back in time and took an MA (1994-1995) in Classical and Byzantine Art at the Courtauld Institute, University of London. It was during her MA that she discovered Late Antique Syria, which became the subject of her PhD thesis at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

After graduating from SOAS in February 2001 she spent three years living and working as an archaeologist, fund-raiser, secretary and potato-peeler for the Community of Mar Musa (St. Moses) at Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi in Syria. The Community is dedicated to hospitality and Christian-Islamic dialogue and she spent the summers directing an archaeological excavation for the Community at their other monastery, Deir Mar Elian in Qaryatayn, and the rest of the year dealing with all English correspondence, greeting guests and helping with general chores (hence potato-peeling). During this period she was a visiting lecturer at SOAS and at the Université Saint Esprit de Kaslik in Lebanon. She also worked for the Abu Dhabi Ministry of Information as an archaeologist studying the artefacts found at a sixth-century monastery on the island of Sir Bani Yas.

In January 2004 she took up a position teaching Oriental Christian and Islamic Art at the University of Manchester and in 2010 she was appointed Senior Lecturer. During this time she was also a visiting lecturer at the Art University of Isfahan, Iran, the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Georgia, the University of Tehran, the Teacher Training University of Tehran and the Amirkabir Polytechnic College, Tehran, Iran

She joined the University of Exeter in April 2013 and from November 2012-November 2017 worked on a five-year European Research Council funded project entitled Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural Interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity exploring the purported Syrian evangelisation of Georgia in the fifth century and seeking to answer why the Georgians left the Oriental Orthodox fold to join with the Constantinopolitan Church in the early seventh century. The results of the project were published as a monograph of the same name by Brill in 2018.

From 2018 until the present Emma has held an AHRC GCRF Networking Grant to work with the Georgian National Museum (GNM) on encouraging children from ethnic and religious minorities to engage with Georgian archaeology and history. Part of this project involves working with Georgian teachers to help them develop teaching plans that make more use of Georgian museums.

Research supervision:

I am interested in supervising subjects in the following fields:

• Oriental Christian and early Islamic Art, Architecture and Archaeology
• Late Antique and Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Ecclesiastical History
• Oriental Liturgies
• Issues relating to Middle Eastern Christianity of any period
• European Travellers in the Middle East
• Themes of syncretism and inter-religious and inter-cultural exchange in the Middle East and surrounding area

My completed PhD Students include:

Saeid Khaghani, Iran, “The Effect of Iranian Identity on Mosque Architecture”

Ahmet Sezgin, Turkey, “Perceptions of Mimar Sinan from the Constitutional Revolution until the present day”

Catherine Taylor, USA, “Late Antique Images of the Virgin Annunciate Spinning”

Ermioni Karachliou, Greece, “The Byzantine Churches of the Paliochora Peninsula, Aegina”

Lucy O’Connor, UK, “A reliquary box from the Sancta Sanctorum of St John Lateran”