DrSean Leatherbury

Sean V. Leatherbury is an historian of Roman, late antique, and Byzantine art and architecture. After graduating from Yale, he completed his masters and doctorate at the University of Oxford. His research has been supported by residential fellowships at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles (2014-15), the Bard Graduate Center in New York (2013-14), and the Council for British Research in the Levant (2013-14), and by grants from the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, Corpus Christi College (Oxford), the Association for the Study and Preservation of Roman Mosaics (ASPROM), and the Irish Research Council. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Art History at Bowling Green State University in Ohio (2015-2019) and Research Associate of the Monumental Art of the Christian and Early Islamic East project at Oxford (https://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/monumental-art-of-the-christian-and-early-islamic-east).

Dr. Leatherbury's research examines the relationship between art and text, issues of identity and geography ('regionalism', 'provincialism'), and the transformation of the so-called minor arts (votive offerings, textiles, silver vessels, gold-glass, jewelry) from the Roman period to the early Middle Ages. His first monograph, Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity: Between Reading and Seeing (Routledge, 2019), considers the visual functions of texts inscribed within Christian, Jewish, and early Islamic buildings across the Mediterranean. A recent edited book, Egyptian Artists in the Late Antique and Early Islamic Mediterranean (Sidestone, 2026) examines the evidence for traveling artists in late antiquity. Previous projects include contributions to museum catalogues of objects, including decorated gold-glasses, from the catacombs of Rome (Ashmolean Museum) and Roman and late antique mosaics (Getty Villa); chapters and articles on word-image relations and the visual powers of words in late antiquity, early Christian textiles and silver, Christian visual engagement with Jewish sacrificial traditions, the ritual use of coins as offerings, wall mosaics as sites of cultural negotiation, unusual materials in floor mosaics, iconoclasm as repair, early Christian perceptions of portrait statues, and inscribed cross-pendant necklaces; and contributions to the Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity, the Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, and the Oxford Handbook of Roman Imagery and Iconography. Current projects include book projects on the mosaics of Roman and late antique Syria in their cultural and regional context and on late antique votives; and articles on Umayyad mosaics, lead coffins from Roman Lebanon, and the architectural conversion of a Nabataean tomb at Petra into a Christian church. 

Since 2021, Dr. Leatherbury has been co-convenor of the UCD Late Antique and Byzantine Seminar Series (with Professor Lynda Mulvin). He is currently mosaics curator and board member of Manar al-Athar (http://www.manar-al-athar.ox.ac.uk), an open-access photo archive for the study of the ancient and medieval Middle East, based at Oxford. In 2020-2021, with Ine Jacobs (Oxford), he co-directed the Premodern Digital Cultural Heritage Network, funded by a collaborative IRC-AHRC networking grant. He is a member of the UCD Humanities Institute.