Kate Cooper

Kate Cooper (born 1960) is a Professor of History and former head of the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, a role to which she was appointed in September 2017 and she stood down in 2019. She was previously Professor of Ancient History and Head of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Manchester, where she taught from 1995. Early life and education Cooper was born in 1960 in Washington, D.C. She gained a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University in 1982, and an M.T.S. in Scripture and Interpretation from Harvard University in 1986. She was awarded her doctorate for the thesis 'Concord and Martyrdom: Gender, Community, and the Uses of Christian Perfection in Late Antiquity' from the Department of the Study of Religion, Princeton University, in 1992. Her supervisor was Peter Brown. She is known by and publishes under the name Kate Cooper. Career Cooper held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2012–15) for a project on 'The Early Christian Martyr Acts: A New Approach to Ancient Heroes of Resistance'. Her research interests are the cultural, social, and religious history of late Roman society, focusing particularly on the Christianization of Roman elites, and on daily life and the Roman family, religion and gender, social identity, and the fall of the Roman Empire. Other major fellowships and prizes she has held include a Research Councils UK Fellowship to investigate the role of violence in early Christianity during the century before and after the reign of Constantine the Great, asking what was distinctive about the Christian approach to violence, and the role of violence in establishing identities and boundaries between communities (2009–12); and the Rome Prize (1990-1). She was a Summer Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 1998. Her project was “The Roman Cult of Eastern Martyrs, 400–700”. She is a regular contributor to print and broadcast media in the US and UK, and blogs about her work. Critical reception of work Her work has been described as 'ambitious', 'valuable', and 'noteworthy'. Band of Angels was reviewed in the New Statesman, which said: "Her book is characterised by a scholarly seriousness and the disarmingly unapologetic way she links the personal, the political and the institutional. Avoiding clichés, she excavates the experiences of a wide range of women, letting them speak for themselves.