Mar Marcos is a Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cantabria in Spain. She has broad interests in the social, political and religious history of the Roman Empire, especially in religious politics in Late Antiquity. She did her doctorate in 1990 and spent two years in Oxford as postoctoral student working on Women in Politics in Late Antiquity (supervised by Fergus Millar). Since her return to the University of Cantabria in 1992, she has been teaching Roman History, first as a Lecturer and since 2016 as a Full Professor. She is the coordinatar of the research group AIHR (Archaeology and History of the Roman Empire), a multidisciplinary team comprising ancient historians, archaeologists, philologists, and scholars of Roman law (https://grupos.unican.es/ahir). She has been visiting scholar at Wolfson College and Corpus Christi College at Oxford, Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard, Roma
Sapienza, and École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne, Paris).Currently, Mar directs the projects "Sedito in urbe: Religious Disputation and Social Order in Late Antiquity" and the "Ancient Religions and Cults Network (ARACNe)".
Within the University of Cantabria, she has held various leadership roles, including Head of the Department of Historical Sciences, Director of the Office for Equality and Social Policy, and Director of the Doctoral School. She has also served as Vice-president of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), Member of the Executive Committee of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR), and President of the Spanish Association for the Scientific Study of Religion (SECR). She is an Associate Member of the Sapienza Centre for the Study of the Mediterranean and Near East in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, and has been distinguished as an Honorary Life Member of the IAHR.
Edited books
-Bishops, Councils and Imperial Court in the Western Roman Empire, Edipuglia: Munera, Collana di Studi Storici sulla Tarda Antichità (forthcoming).
-Loca haereticorum. La geografia dell’eresia nel Mediterraneo tardoantico (with Tessa Canella) in Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni, 85/1 (2019) (monograph volume).
-The Role of the Bishop in Late Antiquity: Conflict and Compromise (with Andrew T. Fear and José Fernández Ubiña), London: Bloomsbury 2013.
