Michael Kulikowski

Biography:

I am a late Roman historian and work on the political and institutional history of the empire between the second and fifth centuries, with a special interest in how one can read historical sources against the background of other evidence. My first book was a study of Roman and post-Roman Spain that tried to set the small body of written texts against the background of material culture; my second looked at the impact of Roman imperialism on neighboring territories and argued that the history of the barbarians, specifically the Goths, can be understood entirely as a response to Roman imperialism. I am presently at work on four projects: a history of the Roman empire from Hadrian to the fall of the western empire for the Profile History of the Ancient World; a study of late imperial political culture and the gap between political rhetoric and political practice called The Rhetoric of Being Roman; a history of the Latin chronicle tradition from its beginnings to the fifth century AD, in four volumes and in collaboration with R.W. Burgess; and as editor-in-chief of the forthcoming Landmark Ammianus Marcellinus.

Before coming to Penn State in 2009, I taught for eight years at the University of Tennessee