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Department of

History

Jonathan Conant, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, History

Jonathan P. Conant, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the History Department, also currently serves as the coordinator of the Classical Studies minor.  Conant offers undergraduate courses on the ancient world, the medieval world, Greek civilization, Roman civilization, the fall of the Roman empire, castles and crusades, and historians’ methods.  His research focus is on the Mediterranean world in late antiquity, with a special emphasis on questions of empire, identity, trade and communications, urban and rural life, literacy, and violence.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University
B.A., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Scholarly and Creative Work

Conant’s research has focused on the interregional integration of the Mediterranean and the transition from antiquity to the middle ages.  His book, Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), examines Roman identities in the region of modern Tunisia and Algeria after the collapse there of Roman power, between the Vandal invasion of the early fifth century and the Islamic conquests of the late seventh.  He has also written shorter pieces on the dissemination of North African saints’ cults into medieval Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire, on rural literacy in late fifth-century North Africa, and on documentary practice in late Roman Africa.  Conant has received a number of awards and fellowships, including an Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellowship in Byzantine Studies.

Teaching Interests

Conant teaches a broad range of classes, including general surveys of world history, more specialized courses in the history of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, and undergraduate seminars in research methodology.  In addition to teaching departmental classes, Conant has also participated in a team-taught, interdisciplinary class on Augustine’s life and thought.  His classes draw on art and archaeology as well as student analysis of translated primary sources to look at interactions between and among regions, and to examine the cultures, societies, and politics of the ancient and medieval past.