Dr Rebecca Darley holds a PhD in Byzantine Studies and a MA in Greek Archaeology from the University of Birmingham (UK), and completed her BA in History at Cambridge University. She has held permanent faculty positions at Birkbeck, University of London (2015-2021), and the University of Leeds (2021-2025) and taught in fixed term roles at King’s College London and the University of Birmingham. She has also held residential research fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D C., and ANAMED in Istanbul and worked as a research associate in the international “Bilderfarhzeuge” group at the Warburg Institute, London. In addition to her research and teaching work, she has been employed by the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, as an exhibition curator, and the British Academy to examine Open Access policies in the UK. She is in demand internationally as a public historian, working with museums and cultural institutions and writes regularly for a popular audience alongside her academic publications. In 2026 she moved to Krea University as Associate Professor of History, to pursue the unparalleled opportunities that the institution offers for her research and teaching goals.

Rebecca’s research focuses on telling big, global-scale stories from some of the smallest traces of the deep past. She has published widely on coins from the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE, using them alongside texts, archaeological site data, buildings and images to explore questions relating to frontiers, world views, economic change, inter-regional connections and the organisation of labour. As a scholar of material culture, she is also deeply interested in heritage and museology, with publications on collection histories, colonial and post-colonial collecting strategies and the significance of heritage for communities in the present. Her research has been funded by various grants, including a prestigious Wolfson Fellowship award, completed in 2025, which supported the publication of her forthcoming monograph on the history of the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE.

Teaching for Rebecca goes hand-in-hand with research. She has taught at all levels of Higher Education, from BA to PhD, including ancient and medieval history survey courses, research-led courses on material culture, the history of ideas and the Indian Ocean world, and methodological and theory courses in History, Classics and Archaeology. She has also coordinated design and reform of programme-level curricula and supported colleagues at two institutions to develop cross-disciplinary, global approaches to teaching. She is a Senior Fellow of Advanced HE, the UK’s accreditation body for Higher Education teaching, in recognition of her leadership and personal pedagogic practice.

Research

Dr Rebecca Darley’s research brings together different kinds of material – from coins to manuscripts, buildings and shipwreck evidence – to explore political, economic and cultural changes in the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium C.E. This was a time of dramatic changes, including the rise and fall of empires and the emergence of new global religions. Her research argues that it laid some of the critical foundations of the world today, including practices of statehood and the creation of political and social identities that cut vertically across divisions of wealth and hierarchy.

Material culture has been critical throughout Rebecca’s work. She is a specialist in numismatics or the study of coins and related objects, and has worked with museums and collections in India, the UK, Europe and the USA. However, her publications also engage closely with textual sources and visual material, including perceptions of India by writers in the Mediterranean in the first millennium, and the depiction of labour and resource management in Tamil epic poetry.

Historical research is the translation of the remains of the past into meaningful narratives in the present. Alongside her academic research, Rebecca is also committed to making the deep past publicly accessible and to exploring its wider importance. She has curated museum exhibitions and regularly contributes her expertise as a Smithsonian Journeys expert on historical tours in the Mediterranean. She is regularly invited to offer public lectures by international venues and has talked about medieval history as part of the BBC talk show, ‘The Long View’. She blogs weekly about history at coffeewithclio.substack.com

Publications

Monograph

Darley, Rebecca, Daniel Reynolds, and Chris Wickham, Open Access Journals in Humanities and Social Science: A British Academy Research Project (The British Academy, 2014) <https://eve.gd/images/BritishAcademyReport2014.pdf>

Articles and book chapters (sole-authored)

‘Byzantium, South Asia and Revenant Romanitas: Rejecting the Post-Roman Worldview’, in Byzantium Beyond Byzantium, ed. by Adrian Pirtea, Nikolaos Zagklas, and Giulia Rossetto, Moving Byzantium (Vienna University Press, 2026), pp. 235–64

‘River, Rain and Sea: Physical and Behavioural Ephemerality in Peninsular South Asia in the First Millennium CE’, in Invisible Labour and Ancient Economy, ed. by Rubina Raja and Nathanael Andrade (Brepols, 2025), pp. 121-152

‘Who Ate All the Pepper? Consumers and Consumables in the Mediterranean c. AD 1-800’, in Approaching Social Hierarchies in Byzantium: Dialogues Between Rich and Poor, ed. by Anna C. Kelley and Flavia Vanni (Routledge, 2025), pp. 35‒53

‘Indian Ocean Trade in the First Millennium c.e.: Taking the Romans out of Indo-Roman?’, Journal of Roman Studies, 114 (2024), 145-169

‘Seen from across the Sea: India in the Byzantine Worldview’, in Global Byzantium: Papers from the Fiftieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. by Leslie Brubaker, Rebecca Darley, and Daniel Reynolds (Routledge, 2022), pp. 9–38, doi:10.4324/9780429291012

‘Introduction: The Future of Global Byzantium’, in Global Byzantium: Papers from the Fiftieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. by Leslie Brubaker, Rebecca Darley, and Daniel Reynolds, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies Publications, 24 (Routledge, 2022), pp. 1–8, doi:10.4324/9780429291012-1

‘The Value of the Past: Heritage between Local, Global and National’, in A British Book Collector: Rare Books and Manuscripts in the R. E. Hart Collection, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, ed. by Cynthia Johnston (University of London Press, 2021), pp. 213–28 <https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo69556784.html>

‘Byzantine Gold Coins and Peninsula India’s Late Antiquity’, in From Constantinople to Chang’an: Byzantine Gold Coins in the World of Late Antiquity, ed. by Sven Günther, Li Qiang, Lin Ying, and Claudia Sode, (Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations [Changchun], 2021), pp. 135–69, published in Chinese as ‘罗马-拜占庭钱币的流入与印度次大陆的社会变迁 (The Inflow of Roman-Byzantine Coins and the Social Transformation in the Indian Subcontinent)’, trans. by Wang Baixu, 古代文明 (The Journal of Ancient Civilizations), 14.3 (2020), 43–50

‘The Tale of the Theban Scholastikos, or Journeys in a Disconnected Sea’, Journal of Late Antiquity, 12.2 (2019), 488–518

‘The Island Frontier: Socotra, Sri Lanka and the Shape of Commerce in the Late Antique Western Indian Ocean’, al-Masāq, 31.2 (2019), 223–41, doi:10.1080/09503110.2019.1604930

‘Money, Art and Representation: The Powerful and Pragmatic Faces of Medieval Coinage’, in A Cultural History of Money in the Medieval Age, ed. by Rory Naismith (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), pp. 99–124

‘Worth and Value: New Readings of Roman Coins in the Collection of the Telangana State Archaeology Museum’, in Proceedings of the International Conference, Rediscovering Telangana, Hyderabad, January 2017 (Heritage Telangana, 2019), pp. 64–82

‘Wege des Geldes: Zwei byzantinische Münzen auf der Reise von Empire zu Empire’, in Bilderfahrzeuge: Aby Warburgs Vermächtnis und die Zukunft der Ikonologie, ed. by Andreas Beyer, Horst Bredekamp, Uwe Fleckner, and Gerhard Wolf, trans. by V. G. Topalova and Violetta Georgieva (Klaus Wagenbach, 2018), pp. 144–54

‘“Implicit Cosmopolitanism” and the Commercial Role of Ancient Lanka’, in Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History, ed. by Zoltán Biedermann and Alan Strathern (University College London Press, 2017), pp. 44–65 <http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1557938/1/Sri-Lanka-at-the-Crossroads-of-History.pdf> [accessed 7 January 2025]

‘All That Glitters…: The Byzantine Gold Solidus, c.  300-1092’, in Proceedings of the XV International Numismatic Congress, Taormina, 2015, ed. by Maria Caccamo Caltabiano (Arbor Sapientiae, 2017), ii, 982–85

‘Self, Other and the Use and Appropriation of Late Roman Coins in South India and Sri Lanka (4th-7th Centuries A.D.)’, in Negotiating Cultural Identity: Landscapes in Early Medieval South Asian History, ed. by Himanshu Prabha Ray (Routledge, 2015), pp. 60–84

Articles and book chapters (co-authored)

With Luca Zavagno: ‘Human pasts, collective ownership and the challenges of a globalising curriculum’, in Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd Annual Colloquia of the Classical Association of Ghana, ed. by Michael Okyere Asante and Gifty Ankomah (under consideration with Cambridge University Press)

With Daniel Reynolds: ‘Exhibiting Coins as Economic Artefacts. Curating Historical Interpretation in Faith and Fortune: Visualizing the Divine on Byzantine and Early Islamic Coinage (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, November 2013‒January 2015)’, Journal of Art Historiography, 13 (2015), 1–23

With Xuefei Han: ‘A Historiographical Survey of Sinophone Research into Mediterranean-East Asian Maritime Trade (1st-8th Centuries CE)’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 67 (2024), 464‒96

With Jackson Hase: ‘Collections to Think with: Collecting, Scholarship and Belonging in the R. E. Hart Collection (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery)’, Journal of the History of Collections, 32.2 (2020), 369–78, doi:10.1093/jhc/fhz022

Editorials

Darley, Rebecca, ‘Introduction’, in Global Byzantium: Papers from the Fiftieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. by Leslie Brubaker, Rebecca Darley, and Daniel Reynolds (Routledge, 2022), pp. 1–8, doi:10.4324/9780429291012

Zavagno, Luca, Rebecca Darley, and Jonathan Jarrett, ‘Editorial’, al-Masāq, Not the Final Frontier: The World of Medieval Islands, 31.2 (2019), 129–39, doi:10.1080/09503110.2019.1596645

Encyclopaedia entries/short contributions

‘India, Red Sea Trade With’, in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History, ed. by D. T. Potts, Ethan Harkness, Jason Neelis, and Roderick James McIntosh (Wiley, 2023), doi:10.1002/9781119399919.eahaa00824

Nicholson, Oliver, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2018), doi:10.1093/acref/9780198662778.001.0001: I was Area Advisor for Numismatics and Assistant Editor for Social and Economic History. Editorial responsibility for over 100 entries, contributions to over 40 and sole-authorship of the second largest number of contributions (55) in the volume by any writer, including entries on ‘Money’, ‘Spices and the Spice Trade’, ‘Post-Roman coinage’ and specific denominations and numismatic elements from across the Roman, Islamic and Western medieval world.

Book reviews

‘Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 316 Pp. ISBN 9781316795453. $39.99.’, Journal of Early Modern History, 25.3 (2021), pp. 265–67, doi:10.1163/15700658-12342679

‘MATTHEW A. COBB (ED.), THE INDIAN OCEAN TRADE IN ANTIQUITY: POLITICAL, CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC IMPACTS. London: Routledge, 2019. Pp. Xi + 237, Illus., Maps. isbn 9781138738263. £115.00. – NATHANAEL J. ANDRADE, THE JOURNEY OF CHRISTIANITY TO INDIA IN LATE ANTIQUITY: NETWORKS AND THE MOVEMENT OF CULTURE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. Xvii + 296, Maps. isbn 9781108419123. £75.00.’, Journal of Roman Studies, 110 (2020), pp. 361–63, doi:10.1017/S007543582000009X

‘ISSUES OF MOBILITY IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE – (E.) Lo Cascio, (L.E.) Tacoma (Edd.) The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire. Proceedings of the Twelfth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Rome, June 17–19, 2015). With the Assistance of Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga. (Impact of Empire 22.) Pp. Xii + 265, Maps. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. Cased, €114, US$125. ISBN: 978-90-04-33477-9.’, The Classical Review, 68.2 (2018), pp. 518–21, doi:10.1017/S0009840X18001518

‘R. Gurukkal, ROMAN TRADE WITH INDIA – R. Gurukkal Rethinking Classical Indo-Roman Trade. Political Economy of Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Relations. Pp. Xiv + 331, Ills, Maps. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. Cased, £31.99, US$55. ISBN: 978-0-19-946085-4.’, Classical Review, 66.2 (2016), pp. 512–14, doi:10.1017/S0009840X16001359

‘M. Crusafont, A. M. Balaguer, and P. Grierson, M. CRUSAFONT, A.M. BALAGUER and P. GRIERSON, Medieval European Coinage 6: The Iberian Peninsula, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. Xxxiii + 886 Pages Including 60 Plates. ISBN 978-0-521-26014-5. RRP £159.99’, Numismatic Chronicle, 175 (2015), pp. 366–76

‘Claire Nesbitt and Mark Jackson, Nesbitt, C., and M. Jackson, Eds. Experiencing Byzantium. Papers from the 44th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Newcastle and Durham, April 2011. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. 406. ISBN 9781472412294. £85.00’, Diogenes, 2 (2014), pp. 91–95

Popular/Public-facing publications

In addition to blogposts for various projects, Rebecca also blogs weekly about history at coffeewithclio.substack.com

‘The Godawaya Shipwreck’ (p. 397), ‘Siraf: A Sasanian Port’ (p. 379), ‘Barbarikon and the Indus River’ (p. 378) and ‘Arikamedu: An Indian Trading Port’ (p. 431) in Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes, ed. bySusan Whitfield (Thames and Hudson, 2019).

‘Faith and Fortune’, Minerva, 25.1 (2014), pp. 40–43

Exhibitions

Something for my Native Place: R. E. Hart and collectors of the industrial Northwest, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, October 2017-November 2018. Curator of a case on R. E. Hart as coin collector in the context of a wider exhibition about his business and collections

The Lost Box, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, June‒August 2015, part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Lost in Translation’. An experimental exhibition based on an archive of images kept at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham. Sole curator.

Faith and Fortune at The Street Gallery, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, 21 May-25 September 2015. Co-curated with Dr Ali Miynat.

Experiencing Images, Warburg Institute, London, November‒December 2014, part of the 2014 ‘Being Human’ Festival of the Humanities. Exhibition coordinator with Dr Johannes von Müller, co-curation with other members of the ‘Bilderfahrzeuge’ research group.

Faith and Fortune: visualising the divine on Byzantine and early Islamic coinage, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, 8 November 2013‒30 November 2014. Exhibition coordinator. Co-curated with Dr Daniel Reynolds, Dr Ali Miynat and Maria Vrij.

For a complete list including minor and non-peer-reviewed publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0219-418X

Teaching Modules