Ralph Mathisen
Professor of History, the Classics, and Medieval Studies

Curriculum Vitae | Website

Office Hours |
Office | 446K Gregory Hall, (217) 244-5249

Specialties: Late Antiquity; Social and Cultural History of the Roman and Byzantine Empires; Impact of the Barbarian Settlements on Medieval Europe; Survival of Classical Tradition, Law; Numismatics; Prosopography; Codicology; and Computer Applications to Historical Studies.

RALPH W. MATHISEN received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1979 and came to UIUC in 2003 after 23 years at the University of South Carolina, where he was Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities. He is specialist in the society, culture, and religion of Late Antiquity. He has authored or edited ten books, including People, Personal Expression, and Social Relations in Late Antiquity, 2 vols. ( Univ. of Michigan, 2003); Society and Culture in Late Antique Gaul. Revisiting the Sources (Ashgate, 2001) (with D.R. Shanzer); Law, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001); and Ruricius of Limoges and Friends: A Collection of Letters from Visigothic Aquitania (Liverpool Univ. Press, 1999), and has published over 60 scholarly articles. He is Director of the Biographical Database for Late Antiquity Project, of the LT-ANTIQ, NUMISM-L, and PROSOP-L discussion lists, and of the Society for Late Antiquity and Geography of Ancient Gaul websites, and a Fellow of the American Numismatic Society. He currently is working on books on “Barbarian Intellectuals in Late Antiquity”; the late Roman comedy The Querolus; and the life and letters of Desiderius of Cahors (with Danuta Shanzer).