Kevin Feeney

Assistant Professor

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Ph.D., Yale

Areas of Specialty

Roman History, Late Antiquity, Byzantine History, Comparative Political & Social History

Current Research Interests

Imperial Accession, Social Movements in Antiquity, Premodern State Repression

Bio

Kevin Feeney is an Assistant Professor of Roman History. His work focuses on the political and social history of the Late Roman Empire from 250 – 600 CE, though he also ranges both earlier and later. He is especially interested in comparative interdisciplinary work with the social sciences, believing that scholars of modern and premodern political systems have much to learn from one another. He has published on the rhetoric of Roman emperors as well as the construction of their courts and is currently working on his dissertation book, which focuses on Roman imperial accession. He enjoys teaching on all aspects of the Roman world from the early Republic to the medieval empire of Byzantium.

Kevin is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He received his BA in History and Politics at Trinity College, Oxford in 2013 and stayed at Trinity for an MSt in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies in 2014. He received his Ph.D in Ancient History from Yale University in 2020. He spent two years each teaching at Fairfield University and New York University before returning to Connecticut to teach at UConn.

Publications

‘The Emperor is Dead, Long live the Emperor: Imperial Interregna in the Fifth Century’ In N. Lenski & J. W. Drijvers (eds), The Fifth Century: Age of Transformation. Proceedings of the 12^th Biennial Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity Conference. Bari, Edipuglia (2019)

‘Court Construction and Regime Change in the Mid-Fourth Century’ In C. Davenport & M. McEvoy (eds), The Roman Imperial Court in the Principate and Late Antiquity: Continuities, Changes, Connections. Oxford, OUP (2023), 156–171.

‘The Adlocutio at the Accession of the Roman Emperor’ – Classical Quarterly, 73, 1 (May 2023), 397–418.

 Awards

John Addison Porter Dissertation Prize (Yale University)

Hans Gatzke Dissertation Prize (Yale University History Department)