Shekinah Vera-Cruz

I am currently the Career Development Fellow in Ancient History at Trinity.

Before starting this position, I was a doctoral student at the University of Warwick, and was funded by the Wolfson Foundation. I was also a Visitor at the Law and Humanities Hub at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London for the 2024/5 academic year. In 2024, I spent a semester at the University of Glasgow as the Alan Roger Postgraduate Visiting Researcher at the University of Glasgow. I have also had the pleasure of shorter appointments and visits at Yale University, at the Monash University Prato campus in Italy, and at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt.

I completed both my MPhil (Greek and/or Roman History) and my BA (Ancient and Modern History) at Oxford. In between my bachelor’s degree and my master’s degree, I worked for a year at London consultancy.

At Trinity, I teach the majority of the Roman history papers on the Classics course and on the Ancient and Modern History course, and I have general oversight of all the ancient history teaching at the college. For the Faculty of Classics, I co-teach the Roman Core classes for Classical Archaeology and Ancient History students (CAAH), but I also hold some lectures on Latin for non-language learners. Finally, I am the college advisor for some of Trinity’s graduate students in Ancient History.

My doctoral research was an interdisciplinary study of ritual acts in Roman civil law, especially those which govern the creation of wills, alter the constitution of the family, and effect changes of status and citizenship. I explored the origins, functions, and efficacy of these rituals within the schema of law itself, with an emphasis on the relationship between ‘form’ and ‘substance’ in the Roman ius civile.

My next project is an exploration of ritual in other areas of the Roman world—especially as it appears in Roman international relations. What happened when Roman institutions escaped the Roman legal order? I am currently working on an article about witnesses and witnessing in Roman legal acts for a forthcoming Cambridge Handbook on law, history, and visuality.

Although my primary training is historical, my work exists in conversation with contemporary legal scholarship, and the disciplines of anthropology and philosophy, especially theories of materiality and legal hermeneutics. My other research interests include slavery in the ancient world, the Roman ‘constitution’, social histories of warfare, and the role of discourse and rhetoric in political, religious, and legal institutions.

‘Beyond communication and control: Witnesses and witnessing in Roman civil law’, in The Cambridge Handbook on Law, History, and the Visual (eds.) L. Peterson, S. Howe and D. Manderson (forthcoming).