Faculty Profile

		Shane Bjornlie, Ph.D. Assistant Professor E-mail: shane.bjornlie@claremontmckenna.edu Phone: (909) 621-8840 Campus Address: 528 Mills Avenue 101 Departments: History
		Leave/Sabbatical Academic Year (on leave or sabbatical for the entire academic year)

Educational Background

B.A., University of Alabama in Huntsville; M.A., Ph.D. Princeton University

Teaching Interests

• History of the Roman Republic and Empire; History of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages; Urban History in Ancient and Medieval Europe; Roman Social History; Historiography and Archaeology of Decline and Fall of Empires

Research Interests

• Intersections of rhetorical representation and historical reality in Late Antiquity (4th-6th centuries); empire theory and concepts of decline and fall; cultural continuity and discontinuity from the Roman to the Carolingian empire; politics and economics in the ancient world; Roman urban history and archaeology; institutional histories of the ancient and medieval military and bureaucracy; history of ancient education and the transmission of classicism; literary history of ancient rhetoric, historiography and epistolography.

Selected Research and Publications

• Politics and Tradition in Sixth-Century Italy: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae (manuscript in progress)
• “Incastellamento” and "Letters" in Bjork, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2010)
• “Amicitia in the epistolary tradition: the case of Cassiodorus’ Variae”, Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae 34 (forthcoming)
• "Assessing decline and fall in Ostrogothic Italy: the fiscal profile from Cassiodorus' Variae", presented to the Classical Association of Scotland (2009)
• "What have elephants to do with sixth-century politics? A reappraisal of the 'official' governmental dossier of Cassiodorus", Journal of Late Antiquity 2.1 (spring, 2009)
• Review of Catherine Chin, Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World, Bryn Mawr Classical Review (May, 2008)
• "Amicitia and political survival: Cassiodorus’ Variae in context”, presented at Passages from Antiquity to the Middle Ages III, University of Tampere, Finland (2007)
• "Ambrose of Milan", "Cassiodorus", “Macrobius”, in Irby-Massie and Keyser, eds., The Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists (Routledge Press, 2008)
• Review of Peter Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, Bryn Mawr Classical Review (June, 2007)
• “Cassiodorus and the ‘Secret History’ of the Variae”, presented at the 40th Medieval Congress, University of Western Michigan (2005)
• “Book III of Fredegar’s Chronicle: Scarpsum Est from Gregory of Tours?”, presented at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds University (2002)

Selected Awards

• Andrew Heiskell Post-doctoral Rome Prize Fellow