Michael Kulikowski (born September 3, 1970) is an American historian. He is a professor of history and classics and the head of the history department at Pennsylvania State University. Kulikowski specializes in the history of the western Mediterranean world of late antiquity. He is sometimes associated with the Toronto School of History and was a student of Walter Goffart.
Michael Kulikowski | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 3, 1970 |
| Nationality | American |
| Academic background | |
| Education | |
| Doctoral advisor | |
| Influences | Walter Goffart |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline |
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| School or tradition | Toronto School |
| Institutions | |
| Main interests | Late Antiquity |
Biography
editKulikowski is a son of English-born computer engineer Casimir Alexander Kulikowski, and a grandson of the Polish-born inventor Victor Kulikowski. At an early age, he aspired to be a French Floutist. Then, he took his interest in World History in another direction, in another country - first Canada, then the USA. [1][2] He received his BA (1991) from Rutgers University, and his MA (1992) and PhD (1998) from the University of Toronto. He also gained a Licentiate of Mediaeval Studies (canon law) from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in 1995.[3] At the University of Toronto, Kulikowski was a student of Walter Goffart.[4] Among his fellow students of Goffart were Andrew Gillett.[5] After gaining his PhD, which was completed not with Walter Goffart, but with T. D. Barnes,[6] Kulikowski taught at Washington and Lee University, Smith College, and the University of Tennessee. Since 2009, Kulikowski has been Professor of History and Classics and Head of the History Department at Pennsylvania State University.
Kulikowski's first book, Late Roman Spain and Its Cities, was published in 2004. He next work, Rome's Gothic Wars, was published in 2006, and is an introductory textbook on the relations between Goths and the Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD.[7] In his review, Bryan Ward-Perkins described it as a "sensible, clear and uncontroversial introduction to the subject, which deserves to be included on any student reading-list" (alongside Peter Heather's "different take on the same events") which "does indeed introduce the reader to the problems of evidence, and, above all, to the essence of modern debate".[8]
Kulikowski is the author of numerous articles, which range from the dependability of the Notitia Dignitatum[9] as a historical source or ethnic self-identifications[10] to examination of the careers of various late Roman individuals and the problem of the Germanic as a historical category in late antiquity.[11] He is the editor of the forthcoming Landmark Ammianus Marcellinus.
Theories
editCertainly, in time, after being told repeatedly that they were in fact Goths... was [there] no question in anyone's mind that they were indeed Goths.
Kulikowski is sometimes seen as a member of the so-called Toronto School of History, which is associated with his former professor Walter Goffart.[7] Kulikowski advocates purging scholarly discourse from discussion of Germanic peoples, and replacing the term "Germanic" with "barbarian".[13][14]
In Rome's Gothic Wars (2006), Kulikowski denies that the history of the Goths can be reliably traced earlier than the 3rd century AD.[4] He considers all archaeological, linguistic and literary evidence used to propose such earlier histories of the Goths to be completely dependent upon the 6th-century Getica by Jordanes, and therefore of little value.[15][16]
According to Kulikowski, the Goths were mostly of non-Gothic descent, being a population formed from a "large number of [non-Gothic] indigenes and a small number of [Gothic] migrants under the pressure of Roman imperialism, and in the shadow of the Empire".[17] While this is a fairly common view among modern scholars, he has gone so far as to state that the Roman categorization of this large multicultural group would have influenced it to see itself as one people, named after the most important group within it, the Goths. Critics such as Ward-Perkins find this description exaggerated, because it implies the Romans manipulated the ethnic identity of their neighbours, which he believes to be impossible.[4]
Kulikowski believes that the history of the Goths and other "barbarians" should be "understood entirely as a response to Roman imperialism".[3] He labels previous works on the Goths by Peter Heather, Herwig Wolfram, and Volker Bierbrauer as "extreme", "neo-romantic", "bizarre" and "outlandish", and believes they "lack theoretical rigour".[18][19][20] Kulikowski also disagrees with Heather in the assumption that the Huns caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire, describing this idea as "simple, elegant and wrong".[21]
Like Goffart, Kulikowski has been critical of the popular ethnogenesis theory associated the Vienna School of History, and in the English-speaking world with Patrick Geary, and to some extent Peter Heather, which proposes that a Gothic ethnicity formed several times around noble families who carried a single Gothic tradition. He considers it "a way to bring long-distance migration from the Germanic north in by the back door".[14][22] On the other hand, he has written that the Viennese theory "has undoubtedly killed off essentialist views of barbarian tribal identity, an excellent result".[23] Kulikowski charges that old German nationalist and even Nazi influences continue to influence scholarship on the Goths up to the present day, particularly through the theories of Gustav Kossinna.[24] He considers much of what is written about Goths to be "Germanist fantasy" derived from this legacy.[22][25] He writes that Heather in particular "comes perilously close to recreating the old, volkisch notion of an inherent "Germanic" belief in freedom."[26]
Selected works
edit- Late Roman Spain and Its Cities, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004
- Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric, Cambridge University Press, 2006
- The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine, Harvard University Press, 2016
- The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy, Harvard University Press, 2019
References
edit- ^ Kulikowski 2010, p. XVIII.
- ^ "Victor Kulikowski Dies At 86". Central New Jersey Home News. May 10, 1991. p. 20. Retrieved September 12, 2020 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ a b "Michael Kulikowski". Pennsylvania State University.
- ^ a b c d Ward-Perkins 2009, p. 296.
- ^ Gillett 2003, p. X.
- ^ Michael Kulikowski, "Coded Polemic in Ammianus Book 31 and the Date and Place of its Composition," Journal of Roman Studies 102,79–102, Abstract
- ^ a b Humphries 2007, p. 126.
- ^ Ward-Perkins 2009, p. 126
- ^ Kulikowski, "The Notitia Dignitatum as an Historical Source," Historia 49 (2000):358-77
- ^ Kulikowski, "Roman Identity and the Visigothic Settlement in Gaul," in R.W. Mathisen and Danuta Shanzer, edd., Culture and Society in Late Antique Gaul (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers) 2001:26-38
- ^ Kulikowski, "The Marriage of Philology and Race: Constructing the Germanic," in Matthias Friedrich and James M. Harland, edd., Interrogating the Germanic: A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Berlin: De Gruyter) 2021:19–30
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, p. 70.
- ^ Kulikowski 2002, pp. 69–70. "The use of the term 'barbarian' is deliberate and surely non-pejorative. It is to be preferred programmatically to the noun 'German' and the adjective 'Germanic'. 'Germans' and 'Germanic peoples' are the legacy of nineteenth-century philology."
- ^ a b Kulikowski 2009, pp. 1201–1202. "James is clearly correct in deciding to use "barbarian" as a technical term that avoids any implications about ethnicity... This is particularly welcome given the resurgence of "Germanic" as a catch-all term for northern barbarians... [T]he dogma of barbarian ethnogenesis—first brought into English-language scholarship by Patrick Geary and now the dominant approach to the barbarians among early medievalists—is really a way to bring long-distance migration from the Germanic north in by the back door."
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, p. 43. "[O]ne can find it stated that written sources, archaeology, and linguistic evidence all demonstrate that just such a migration took place, if not out of Scandinavia then at least out of Poland. In fact, there is just a single source for this extended story of Gothic migration, the Getica of Jordanes."
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, pp. 67, 212. "It is only the text of Jordanes that leads scholars to privilege the Wielbark connection... The Gotones mentioned in Tacitus, Germania 44.1 and located somewhere in what is now modern Poland would not be regarded as Goths if Jordanes' migration stories did not exist."
- ^ Kulikowski 2011, p. 279.
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, p. 63. "Bierbrauer's simplistic ethnic ascription model is extreme, but only because it is articulated so clearly."
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, pp. 206, 208. "Peter Heather's Goths and Romans, 332–489 (Oxford, 1991) is the best treatment of its subject available in any language... Unfortunately, Heather's more recent works... [advocate a] neo-Romantic vision of mass migrations of free Germanic peoples... [Heather] lack[s] theoretical rigour in relating archaeological and historical evidence.
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, p. 206. "Herwig Wolfram's History of the Goths... is the most widely available [work on Gothic ethnogenesis in English]. Its mixture of outlandish philological speculation, faulty documentation, and oracular pronouncement remains very influential. Less bizarre, if wholly derivative, accounts of ethnogenesis are available in works by Wolfram's Anglophone apostles..."
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, p. 206.
- ^ a b Humphries 2007, p. 128.
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, p. 53.
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, pp. 48–49, 60–61.
- ^ Kulikowski 2006, p. 208.
- ^ Kulikowski 2011, p. 278.
Sources
edit- Gillett, Andrew (2003). Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West, 411–533. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 1139440039.
- Humphries, Mark (2007). "Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric". Classics Ireland. 14. Classical Association of Ireland: 126–129. JSTOR 25528487.
- Kulikowski, Michael (2002). "Nation versus Army: A Necessary Contrast". In Gillett, Andrew (ed.). On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages. ISD. pp. 69–85. ISBN 9782503511689.
- Kulikowski, Michael (2006). Rome's Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1139458092.
- Kulikowski, Michael (August 8, 2011). "Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 42 (2). MIT Press: 277–279. doi:10.1162/JINH_r_00217.
- Kulikowski, Michael (2004). Late Roman Spain and Its Cities. JHU Press. ISBN 978-0801899492.
- Kulikowski, Michael (2009). "Edward James. Europe's Barbarians, AD 200–600". The American Historical Review. 115 (4). American Historical Association: 1201–1202. doi:10.1086/ahr.115.4.1201.
- Ward-Perkins, Bryan (November 2009). "Kulikowski, Rome's Gothic Wars from the Third Century to Alaric". Journal of Roman Studies. 99. Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies: 296–297. doi:10.3815/007543509789744846.
External links
edit
Quotations related to Michael Kulikowski at Wikiquote- Michael Kulikowski Archived 2010-08-17 at the Wayback Machine, University of Tennessee
- Michael Kulikowski, Penn State University
