Radka works on the material histories of the early medieval Mediterranean worlds, with a particular interest in the medieval Roman Empire. Her research is driven by the tension between ‘stuff’ as enduring/disintegrating and tangible/discorporate, speaking to the ongoing contemporary reckoning with the unprecedented amounts of things produced in and producing capitalist modernity. She enjoys working with messy, complicated, and ‘strange’ sources, from hagiographies and medical treatises to early excavation records, writing small stories with big implications that seek to explore the complexity of navigating lives both within and without empire.

Before coming to Princeton, Radka graduated top of her year with a BA in History at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. Her undergraduate dissertation on the empire and Constantinople in the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai was awarded several prizes, including the Faculty Prize and the Mansergh Prize in History. She subsequently earned an MPhil in Classics at the same university as a Harding, Bakala and Hayes scholar, with her thesis on liturgical processions and disease management in sixth-century Rome receiving the faculty’s Members’ Classical Essay prize. She has also completed an internship with the Knossos Stratigraphical Museum in Crete and archaeological courses with the British School at Athens and the British School in Rome.