Thomas Laver is an Early Career Research Fellow in History, working on the economic and social landscape of the Late Roman and Early Islamic Near East. His work focuses particularly on Egypt, making use of the vast corpus of documents from the region written in Greek and Coptic. 

Having completed a BA (Hons) in History and Economics and an MSt in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies in Oxford, Thomas moved to Cambridge in 2021 to do a PhD in History, writing a thesis on “The Economic Organisation of Egyptian Monasteries and their Estates, c. 400-900 AD”. This novel synthesis of documentary evidence from various Egyptian monasteries painted a new picture of monastic estate and economic mentality in Late Antique Egypt, bringing new insights regarding the place of monasteries in Egyptian society, and the approaches we must take in studying the ancient and medieval economy. 

His current work builds from this foundation, while also tackling broader questions of economy and society in the Late Antique and Early Islamic world. During his fellowship he will seek to incorporate more material from other regions of the Middle East, particularly Syria-Palestine and Iraq. He is also involved in the publication of new texts on ostraca and papyrus, and the expansion of the open-access papyri.info resource for ancient documents.

In his free time Thomas goes walking, umpires cricket matches, and tries to keep up with learning various ancient and modern languages.