Michael Kulikowski, Breaking the Barbarian Binary: Ammianus Marcellinus on Regional Identity and Imperial Politics

Michael Kulikowski, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Classics at The Pennsylvania State University, presents Breaking the Barbarian Binary: Ammianus Marcellinus on Regional Identity and Imperial Politics.

Classics / CMS Lecture: Michael Kulikowski

Biography

Michael Kulikowski studies the Roman Empire and the transition to the early Middle Ages in the West. From 2010 to 2023, he served as head of the history department at Penn State. He is the author of several books and more than fifty articles and book chapters on the political and institutional history of the period, with a particular interest in how written evidence can be read in light of archaeological and numismatic material. His most recent monographs, The Triumph of Empire: The Roman Empire from Hadrian to Constantine (2016) and The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy (2019) (Harvard University Press, published internationally by Profile Books as Imperial Triumph and Imperial Tragedy) have appeared in Chinese, Japanese, German and Italian translations. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the TLS and is presently completing work on a fully annotated translation of the late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus.