After an undergraduate degree focusing on Ancient History and Archaeology, I worked as a field archaeologist on rescue excavations around the UK. I returned to university for graduate work at the University of Oxford (MPhil and DPhil). I then moved to Brussels for a postdoctoral research fellowship at the ULB, and then back to Oxford where I held a range of fellowships and lectureships, before coming to King’s. Throughout my career, I have been fortunate in having the opportunity to work in the field at sites around the Roman world. 

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Visual cultures of the Roman world
• Roman history and archaeology
• The body in antiquity
• Myth in Greek and Roman art
• The Roman East

I work on the social and cultural history of the Roman world, with a particular focus on using visual culture and archaeology to study ancient lives and experiences. My research interests are geographically wide-ranging, and I have worked on material at a broad range of sites, including in Britain, FYR Macedonia, Italy, Jordan, Libya, Romania, Syria, and Turkey. I am currently in the process of finishing a monograph that examines experiences of cultural change among the diverse peoples of the Roman Empire through the images that they commissioned, and funerary practices they used. The Roman period saw people employ stone portraits on a scale not seen before, or since: the project uses this significant commemorative phenomenon to explore the new identities that emerged around the Roman world in response to Roman imperialism. It examines images in their original funerary contexts, in a geographically wide-ranging span of monuments (from Syria to Germany, Romania to North Africa), and employs this material evidence to examine how contact with Rome led to the development of new body ideals, gender values and new ways of expressing social prestige as well as reshaping attitudes to memory and commemoration. 

Teaching

I teach a range of subjects to undergraduates, from modules focusing on Roman archaeology and art through to Byzantine history. 

Selected publications

Audley-Miller, L.; Mitchell, S.; Niewöhner, P.; Vardar A and Vardar, L. ‘An Archaeology of Emptiness. Haymana or the Prairie in Roman and Byzantine Times’ Ist. Mitt. 73 (2023), 343-419.

Audley-Miller and Beate Dignas (eds) Wandering Myths: Transcultural Uses of Myth in the Ancient World. De Gruyter (2018).

Audley-Miller, L.; Huy, S.; Erkul, E.; Giese, S.; Niewöhner, P; Stūmpel, H. ‘An ancient cave sanctuary underneath the theatre of Miletus: beauty, mutilation and burial of ancient sculpture in late antiquity.’ Archäologischer Anzeiger (2016). 1. 67-156.

Audley-Miller, L. ‘The Banquet in Palmyrene Funerary Contexts’ in C.M. Draycott and M. Stamatopoulou (eds.) Dining & Death. Interdisciplinary perspectives on the ‘Funerary Banquet’ in ancient art, burial and belief. Leuven: Peeters Colloquia Antiqua. (2016) 549-586.

Audley-Miller, L.; Niewöhner, P. and Prochaska, W. ‘Ancient Marbles, Quarries and Workshops in Macedonia II’ Archäologischer Anzeiger (2013) 1, 95-145.

Audley-Miller, L. ‘Dressed to Impress: the Tomb Sculpture of Ghirza in Tripolitania’ in M. Carroll and J.P. Wild (eds.), Dressing the Dead in Classical Antiquity, Stroud: Amberley Publishing (2012) 99-114.