EX-PATRIA TEAM
Principal Investigator
Ekaterina Nechaeva
Ekaterina Nechaeva is a Junior Professor at the University of Lille, Hub ‘Changing Cultures, Societies and Practices’ and a researcher at the Histoire, Archéologie et Littérature des Mondes Anciens laboratory (HALMA; UMR 8164).
She specialises in Late Antique history, with the focus on international affairs, relations between Rome and the Sasanian Persia, diplomacy, and across-the-border migration and mobility.
DOCTORAL RESEARCHER
Michael David Ethington
Since October 2024 Michael is working on PhD with the Ex-Patria Project. Michael’s dissertation is focused on Tracing Captive Experiences in Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean and West Asia through Syriac sources (4th c. – early 7th c.) under the joint supervision of Ekaterina Nechaeva, Stéphane Benoist and Muriel Debié.
MASTER STUDENT
Maxime Robert
Maxime has a BA 3 in History (University of Lille).
For his dissertation project, he is focusing particularly on the city of Nisibis and its role in the peace treaty of 363. More generally, he is interested in the frontier cities of Late Antiquity.
ACTIVE COLLABORATIONS
Interdisciplinary Collaboration with UMR 9189 CRISTAL on Uncertainty in Historical Knowledge Bases
This ongoing collaboration with Simon Bliudze and Pierre Bourhis takes place within the EX-PATRIA programme and brings together historians and computer scientists to address the structural complexity of historical knowledge. Working continuously as a team—with weekly meetings—we have developed a dedicated ontology for Late Antique prosopography and are currently applying it to the semantic parsing and representation of selected case studies.
Pierre Bourhis
Pierre Bourhis is a member of UMR 9189 CRIStAL and a CNRS researcher. He received his PhD from the Université Paris Sud (2011). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Computer Science of Oxford University (2011-2013). He is a specialist in databases and knowledge representation in artificial intelligence.
Simon Bliudze
Simon Bliudze is a member of UMR 9189 CRIStAL and researcher at the INRIA Lille – Nord Europe centre; he is also a part-time lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the École polytechnique. He obtained a Master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of St. Petersburg (Russia, 1998), a DEA (Master’s research) in Computer Science from the University of Paris 6 (DEA Algorithmics; France, 2001) and a PhD in Computer Science from the École Polytechnique (France, 2006).
Collaboration on Global Late Antiquity and connectivity across Central, West Asian, and Mediterranean worlds: Ērān Tūrān Hrōm network
Khodadad Rezakhani
This collaboration with Khodadad Rezakhani is grounded in shared research on mobility, imperial frontiers, and connectivity across the Roman–Iranian world. Together, we co-organize the Ērān Tūrān Hrōm network, which promotes interdisciplinary dialogue on Global Late Antiquity through initiatives such as the Ērān Research Forum (Lille, 2024) and the ongoing Ērān Tūrān Hrōm Talk Series. We are also preparing the launch of a new open-access journal to further support collaborative research on West and Central Asia within wider Afro-Eurasian dynamics.
Khodadad Rezakhani is a historian of Late Antique and early medieval West and Central Asia, with a particular focus on the Sasanian Empire. He is currently Principal Investigator of the A City of Many Cities: Ctesiphon and Baghdad project (Gerda Henkel Stiftung) and Lecturer in the International Studies Programme at Leiden University. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2010 and has held academic positions in the UK, US, and Germany, including at Princeton, the LSE, and the Freie Universität Berlin.
Collaboration on Eastern Christianities and Elite Conversion in Late Antique Iran: Sources, Language, and Historiography
Alexey Muraviev
This collaboration with Alexey Muravyev, a leading expert in Eastern Christianities and Late Antique Iran, is part of the EX-PATRIA programme at UMR 8164 HALMA. It includes joint work on Syriac texts—such as the annotated translation of the Acts of Dado, Gabralaha, and Kazo—as well as co-teaching in Classical Georgian. The partnership began with the Autumn School Ad limina orientis (2022) and continues through joint publications and contributions to the Persian Martyrs’ Acts series, enriching global Late Antiquity studies at Lille.
Alexey Muraviev is a Habilitated Professor of Late Antique and Medieval History and Head of the Department of Central Asia and the Caucasus Institute of Asian and African Studies of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. He was a visiting scholar at the EX-PATRIA for three months starting from October 2024.
FORMER MEMBERS
Postdoctoral researchers
Daniel Alford
Daniel Alford’s focus within the EX-PATRIA Project will be on the movement of families in Armenia and Northern Mesopotamia. The administrative division of Armenia makes it an excellent case-study for understanding the permeability of imperial borders, as communities were required to operate across these borders in order to impose group cohesion and pursue more personal objectives – such as seeking education, entering alliances for the purpose of child-foesterage or arranging suitable marriages. Sasanian Mesopotamia, on the other hand, was well-placed for trade and agriculture centre, as well as an important centre for the Zoroastrian elite, and Christian and Jewish religious minorities. It was thus a frequent destination for individuals entering the Sasanian Empire. Dr. Alford is interested in examining the way that geography and administrative divisions affected movement and settlement practices. He will also work on sources in Classical Armenian and Middle Persian more generally in order to contribute to the project’s base of knowledge on the western Iranian world.
Short bio
Daniel Aldord gained a BA and DPhil in History, as well as an MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford, before moving to the University of Lille as a Post-doctoral researcher in 2023. His research interests centre on the position of Armenia in the global late antique world, looking particularly at the way in which religious and family practices in the fifth to seventh centuries CE were influenced by the region’s liminal position between the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires and its deep cultural ties with the Iranian milieu. Dr. Alford is especially concerned with the roles of women and children and contributing to the growing body of research on their experiences.
Anna Usacheva
Anna Usacheva will soon start working on her sub-project within the EX-PATRIA project: Called by the Trumpet: Influence of the Ecclesiastic Propaganda on the Migration Behaviour and Social Attitude of the Romans toward their Sassanid Neighbours. She will explore how religious self-identification played into the emigration behaviour of the Antiochian school’s associates and builds a prosopographic network of scholars and ecclesiastic officials associated with the school in Antioch, which will be integrated/connected to the prosopographical knowledge base on Late Antique migrants.
Her field of expertise and research interests focus on the study of the literature, philosophy, social and institutional history of late antiquity.
Short bio
She obtained her doctoral degree in Classical and Byzantine Philology from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2011. After that she was teaching ancient Greek and Latin Languages and literature and philosophy of Late Antiquity at St Tikhon University (Moscow). She also held a position of a chief editor at the academic publishing house “Dmitry Pozharsky University Press”. In 2015, she secured the Marie Skłodowska-Curie funding (Aarhus University). Her research resulted in a monograph Knowledge, Language and Intellection from Origen to Gregory Nazianzen (2017, Peter Lang). In this study, she explored the theological problems discussed during the second wave of the so-called Arian crisis, from the perspective of classical and late antique epistemological, linguistic, logical and ontological theories. In 2018, she received a Core Fellowship from the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her research project was entitled Physiology of Human Intelligence in De Natura Hominis by Nemesius of Emesa. In 2019, she founded a new academic peer-reviewed Series called Contexts of Ancient and Medieval Anthropology (Brill). From 2020 until 2023, she has been employed as a senior researcher and the Vice-Leader of the Project Authorial Publication in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (University of Helsinki). In this research project, she combined the methodologies of historical, philological and sociological scholarship to capture and explain the cultures of publishing in Late Antiquity.