Arkadiy Avdokhin

Dr Arkadiy Avdokhin has recently defended his doctoral thesis at King's College London and joined HSE as a Postdoctoral fellow. He is teaching seminars in late antiquity and Byzantium.

Originally trained as a classicist at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Arkadiy went on to do his PhD at King's, where he also gained experience in undergraduate teaching. He was also an active participant of late antique and Byzantine seminars at the University of Oxford in 2013-15

Dr Avdokhin is a scholar with wide-ranging interests in how texts work in late antiquity and early Byzantium (4^rd–7^th cc. AD) as means of communicating religious and social discourses. His academic interests span from devotional poetry to inscribed imperial edicts put up in city spaces, as these all are various manifestations of textuality and how it functions in this period.

Arkadiy's thesis examined Athanasius of Alexandria’s thought and writings in the context of ecclesial, ascetic, and liturgical developments in fourth-century Christian communities in Egypt. Currently he is working on a research project on early Byzantine imperial epigraphy while continuint his research into early Christian prayers and hymns

Dr Arkadiy Avdokhin has worked on the intricate relationships between liturgical texts, doctrine and ecclesial politics for many years. Alongside his interest in late antique hymnic texts (mainly Christian, but also non-Christian), Dr Avdokhin has engaged with the study of such wider strands of late antique religiosity as the cult of emperor (particularly in the context of the shift to Christianity) and religious epigraphy (particularly its visual presence in urban spaces), and these interests have expressed themselves in a number of conference papers and forthcoming publications.

Dr Avdokhin's overarching interest is in the different facets of religious language and discourse (both linguistically and visually conceived) in course of the arrival of Christianity as the new dominant religion in late antiquity, and how it established itself in cultic and religious public texts. (Para)liturgical hymns (Christian and pagan), religious inscriptions, and public involvement with the cult of emperor all fit within this wider conceptual frame.