James Cogbill

I am a DPhil candidate in Byzantine History at Worcester College, Oxford, supervised by Professor Catherine Holmes and Dr Marek Jankowiak. My doctoral project explores the mutually-inscribing interconnectivity of the premodern ruling family and ‘political culture’ – the framework of structures, practices and expectations within which a polity’s political actors operate – in the Late Byzantine period (c. 1261-1461). By seeking to understand how power was conceptualised, negotiated and deployed in Late Byzantium, my research aims to contribute to an understanding of premodern authority with implications for, and beyond, the late medieval Mediterranean. I received my undergraduate degree in Ancient and Medieval History from the University of Birmingham, and then moved to Oxford for an MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. My MPhil thesis was a comparative study of eleventh- and twelfth-century monasticism in the Greek East and the Latin West. My doctoral research is generously funded by the OOC AHRC DTP, the Clarendon Fund and All Souls College, Oxford.