Rebecca Darley is Associate Professor of History at Krea University, India. Her work focuses on the eastern Mediterranean and the western Indian Ocean in ancient and medieval times. After completing her doctorate in Byzantine studies at the University of Birmingham in 2013, she held permanent faculty positions at Birkbeck, University of London (2015-21) and the University of Leeds, UK (2021-25) before seizing the opportunity to work in South India. Rebecca has won awards and grants for her teaching and research and held residential research fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. (2012-13) and Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilization in Istanbul (2025-26).

As part of her research, Rebecca has been fortunate to spend considerable time in the Mediterranean (especially Italy and Türkiye, as well as Greece, Jordan and Israel) and the Indian Ocean (particularly South India and Sri Lanka). She was part of a Getty program dedicated to the art and material culture of the Crusades and lectures annually in Venice for the John Hall Venice course. She has a long history of working with museums to curate or consult on exhibitions of ancient material, especially coins. She regularly presents and publishes her research in fields ranging from archaeology and classics to museology.

As scholar of the Byzantine Empire, Rebecca is fascinated by places like northeastern Italy, Sicily, and the Adriatic coast. Here the empire met other influences, creating unique expressions of Mediterranean culture steeped in millennia of shared traditions and competing identities. As a scholar of South India, she explores themes of cultural transformation and political change, the role of long-distance trade (including with the Mediterranean) and the movement of goods and ideas.

Rebecca is drawn to the power of the past to help us connect with places and people, to make sense of the world, and to relate to different lives and cultures. The opportunity to engage directly with sites, objects, and landscapes and to think with other interested people about the everyday and the huge connecting forces of history is her greatest passion.