Prestigious research prize worth £100k awarded to University

A world-leading researcher in ancient history at the University of St Andrews has been awarded a prestigious £100,000 Philip Leverhulme Prize by a major national funding body.

Dr Myles Lavan, from the School of Classics, has been awarded one of the 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prizes by the Leverhulme Trust. The £100,000 Philip Leverhulme Prizes recognise the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising.

Dr Lavan’s prize was granted for his research on imperialism, citizenship and slavery in the Roman Empire. His work is distinctive for its development of new methodologies to manage various types of uncertainty that complicate the historian’s task, ranging from the ambivalence of literary texts through the ambiguity of ordinary language to quantitative uncertainty.

Dr Lavan’s work on the spread of Roman citizenship pioneered a new approach to quantitative uncertainty by redeploying a probabilistic technique commonly used in forecasting as a tool of historical analysis.

The prize will fund two years of research leave allowing Dr Lavan to further his research on the society and culture of the Roman empire and to write a book about what historians can learn about uncertainty from other fields such as risk analysis, linguistics and literature.

The Leverhulme Trust was established by the Will of William Hesketh Lever, the founder of Lever Brothers. Since 1925 the Trust has provided grants and scholarships for research and education.

Today, it is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing approximately £80m a year.