Andrew McNey
I am a DPhil in History student at Reuben College Oxford, funded jointly by the Clarendon Fund and the AHRC OOC Doctoral Training Partnership. I completed my MSt in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford in June 2023. In January 2024 I completed a research internship at the University of Cambridge, documenting archaeobotanical material from the site of Yotvata.
My research seeks to reconcile palaeoclimate data with the historical record, integrating archaeobotanical and papyrological material into studies of community resilience in the past. I strive to bring to the fore those individuals often silent in narratives of resilience against environmental shocks, disease and war. My thesis is centred on the village communities of the Southern Levant in the 6th and 7th centuries, bridging the gap between late antiquity and the medieval/early Islamic period.
In December 2023 I published “Ecocide in Late Antiquity: Environmental Spoliation and Human Resilience in the Negev” with the New Classicists journal.
My DPhil is co-supervised by Dr Fanny Bessard and Prof Mike Charles.
