About

Michael Kulikowski is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Classics at Penn State University. He studies the Roman empire and the transition to the early Middle Ages in the West. From 2010 to 2023, he served as the 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), have been published internationally and translated into Chinese, Japanese, German, and Italian. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the TLS and is currently completing a fully annotated translation of the late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Ancient history
• Law
• Classics
• Economic history
• Geography

Selected publications

• BITS AND BRIDLES: A NOTE ON AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS 19.8.7

  The Classical Quarterly · 2026-04-20

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Escaping from the sack of Amida in 359, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus encountered a runaway horse pulling behind it the dead body of a groom who had tied himself to the horse and fallen off (19.8.6–7). The article argues that errors in text and punctuation and a lack of equestrian knowledge have led to an illogical interpretation of the passage. Where most translators describe the groom being tied to the reins, we should understand habena as a halter used to guide the animal from on foot. Prose rhythm implies that ne labi possit ex more should be taken as a single clause, meaning ‘in the usual manner to stop [the horse] escaping’. Moreover, attention to prose rhythm and Ammianus’ usage also shows that we should further emend sedens to insidens.

  PublisherDOI

• Rome and Byzantium in the Visigothic Kingdom: Beyond Imitatio Imperii ed. by Damián Fernández, Molly Lester, and Jamie Wood (review)

  Journal of late antiquity · 2025-09-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 25.05.15 Pohl, Walter, and Daniel Mahoney, eds. Historiography and Identity IV: Writing History Across Medieval Eurasia.

  Indiana Magazine of History (Indiana University) · 2025-05-19

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Prosopography and ‘Barbarians’

  2025-11-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• ALEX MULLEN and GEORGE WOUDHUYSEN (Eds), Language and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces (Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. Pp. xii + 350. <scp>isbn</scp> 9780198888956 (hbk). £120.00.

  The Journal of Roman Studies · 2025-03-05

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ALEX MULLEN and GEORGE WOUDHUYSEN (Eds), Language and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces (Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. Pp. xii + 350. isbn 9780198888956 (hbk). £120.00.

  PublisherDOI

• Étienne Wolff (éd.): Rutilius Namatianus. Aristocrate païen en voyage et poète. Bordeaux: Ausonius Éditions 2020.

  Gnomon · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Reviews of Books

  Bulletin of Spanish Studies · 2024-04-20

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• LATE ANTIQUE HISTORIOGRAPHY - (P.) Van Nuffelen, (L.) Van Hoof (edd.) Clavis Historicorum Antiquitatis Posterioris. An Inventory of Late Antique Historiography (<scp>a.d</scp>. 300–800). (Corpus Christianorum Claves-Subsidia 5.) Pp. cxvi + 1079. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Cased, €295. ISBN: 978-2-503-55295-8.

  The Classical Review · 2022-06-30

  article1st authorCorresponding

  LATE ANTIQUE HISTORIOGRAPHY - (P.) Van Nuffelen, (L.) Van Hoof (edd.) Clavis Historicorum Antiquitatis Posterioris. An Inventory of Late Antique Historiography (a.d. 300–800). (Corpus Christianorum Claves-Subsidia 5.) Pp. cxvi + 1079. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Cased, €295. ISBN: 978-2-503-55295-8. - Volume 72 Issue 2

  PublisherDOI

• Essays on Malalas in Historiographical Context (on J. Borsch, O. Gengler, and M. Meier, edd., Die Weltchronik des Johannes Malalas im Kontext spätantiker Memorialkultur)

  Histos · 2022-05-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cities and Civic Identities in Late Roman and Visigothic Spain

  Cultural encounters in late antiquity and the Middle Ages · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Ancient history
  • History
  • Classics
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• R. W. Burgess

  University of Ottawa

  13 shared

• Nicola Di Cosmo

  4 shared

• Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

  2 shared

• Matthias Friedrich

  University of Vienna

  2 shared

• Stefan Donecker

  2 shared

• Viera Pinto

  Zurich University of Teacher Education

  2 shared

• Peter Brown

  2 shared

• Kim Bowes

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• The Catto-Lecount Emerging Scholars Fellowship
• School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study,…
• NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant for A Landmark…
• ACLS Collaborative Research Grant for A Landmark Ammianus Ma…
• ACLS Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, National Humanities C…