Professor Caroline Humfress FBA
- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2025
- Honours
- FBA, FRHistS, FSLS
- Sections
- Classical Antiquity , Medieval Studies , Law
Summary
Caroline Humfress is from Hexham, Northumberland. She studied at Queens’ College and St John’s College, University of Cambridge, before being appointed Carlyle Research Fellow in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford (St Catherine’s College).
Humfress joined the University of St Andrews as Professor of Medieval History in 2015, where she helped to found the Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research, having previously taught legal rhetoric, history and classics at UC Berkeley and Birkbeck, University of London. In 2020 she was appointed an L. Bates Lea Global Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School (Ann Arbor), where she regularly teaches a course on Roman law and the Civil Law tradition.
An authority on late antique law and religion, Humfress’ research bridges ancient thought and contemporary theory.
She has given public lectures on almost every continent of the world, including the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought (University of Oxford, 2013). Humfress has played a leading role in major interdisciplinary projects, most recently as co-editor of The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
She has contributed to BBC radio, TV and other digital media, on topics ranging from ‘Gnosticism’ to ‘Constitutional Thinking’.