Dr Lucy Parker

I am a historian of Byzantium and eastern Christianity. My research focuses on religious history in its broader social and cultural context, as well as on women’s and gender history.

I discovered Byzantium as an undergraduate at Lincoln College, Oxford, where I stayed for an MSt and then a DPhil in Byzantine History, working on the pillar-dwelling holy man Symeon Stylites the Younger. My first postdoctoral role, as a Research Associate on the ERC-funded project, ‘Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World’, introduced me to Syriac manuscripts, with which I have been fascinated ever since. After holding a series of teaching and research posts in Oxford, including a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, I moved to the University of Nottingham in 2023 as an Assistant Professor in History. In 2025 I returned to Oxford to take up my current position.

Research Interests

I believe in an inclusive vision of Byzantine history, which includes languages beyond Greek and explores Byzantium’s connections with the Islamicate world and beyond. I am particularly interested in holy men and hagiography; in women’s and gender history; and in the development of eastern Christian communities from the late Roman through the medieval into the Ottoman period.

My first book, Symeon Stylites the Younger and Late Antique Antioch: From Hagiography to History (Oxford, 2022), explores the cult of Symeon Stylites the Younger, an influential but little-studied holy man who lived in the sixth century near Antioch-on the-Orontes. I attempt to rethink the figure of the late antique holy man, reading hagiography ‘against the grain’ in order to uncover scepticism and doubt about holy men and miracles, scepticism which in Symeon’s case was exacerbated by the series of disasters which afflicted the eastern Roman empire during his lifetime. More recently I have worked on hagiography of the early Islamic period, investigating the monks and martyrs of early Islamic Palestine and arguing that the rise of Islam challenged traditional models of holiness and religious authority within middle eastern Christianity.

I am also very interested in the afterlives of Byzantium and the history of early modern eastern Christian communities. I have focused in particular on the Syriac-using communities of the eastern Ottoman empire, their manuscripts and archival traditions, and their global connections.

I am beginning a new project on early modern Syriac women, funded by a Leverhulme Research Project Grant, “Women, Manuscripts and Identity Formation in Syriac Christianity, c.1500-1800”. The project seeks to look beyond the male, clerical elites who have been the focus of many studies on Syriac Christianity. It will illuminate how women acted as key agents within manuscript culture, confessionalization and processes of identity formation, as well as exploring how far Syriac language use and Syriac identity were gendered phenomena.