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.