Margaret M. Andrews
is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Harvard University. She received her AB in Classics from Princeton University and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in the archaeology of Roman urbanism, especially in longue durée processes of physical and social transformation in Roman cities. She has excavated extensively in Italy and Greece, including with the Villa Magna Project, which focused on an imperial villa and medieval monastery south of Rome. She currently co-directs the Falerii Novi Project, which examines the foundation, growth, and late antique transformations of a Roman town in the Middle Tiber Valley.
Shane Bobrycki
is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. He completed his PhD at Harvard University in 2016. He is a specialist of collective behavior, demography, urban and rural resistance and the economy in the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean. He is the author of The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, 2024).
Giulia Bordi
is an Associate Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Roma Tre. Her research interests lie in the field of medieval wall-painting and the interaction between architecture, liturgical furnishings, and wall-painting in the churches of Rome and Byzantium (4thâ14th centuries), as well as in the visualization and documentation systems of medieval wall-painting and liturgical furnishing using digital technologies. She has been studying S. Maria Antiqua for more than ten years, exploring its intriguing and complex stratigraphy of painted plaster layers and proposing a new chronology of the decorative campaigns from the sixth to the eleventh centuries.
François Bougard
is director of the Institut de recherche et dâhistoire des textes at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). He has previously been director of Medieval Studies at the Ãcole française de Rome (1997â2004) and Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nanterre (2004â2020), His work focuses on the early Middle Ages, especially the kingdom of Italy, and on the history of ancient libraries. Among his recent publications are Le royaume
Samuel Cohen
is an Associate Professor of History at Sonoma State University. His research examines social and religious conflict in late antique Rome and the broader Mediterranean. He is especially interested in the role language played in legitimizing power, responding to political instability, and shaping relationships between leaders and their communities. His publications have explored topics such as urban riots at Rome, heresy as a political tool, and the rhetoric of disaster, as well as episcopal authority and jurisdiction in Ostrogothic Italy, migration, violence and episcopal elections, and religious polemic.
Marios Costambeys
is Reader in Medieval History at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Power and Patronage in Early Medieval Italy (Cambridge, Eng., 2007) and co-author of The Carolingian World (Cambridge, Eng., 2011) and Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, Eng., 2013).
Joseph Dyer
taught Music History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, until his retirement in 2001. He has written numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries on chant and liturgy in late antiquity and the Middle Ages (especially Rome), psalmody, monasticism, performance practice, medieval music theory, and music in medieval intellectual life. Major publications include The Scientia artis musice of Hélie Salomon: Teaching Music in the Late Thirteenth Century (Routledge, 2018) and Readers and Hearers of the Word: The Cantillation of Scripture in the Medieval Liturgy (Turnhout, 2022). He is a Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music.
Clemens Gantner
studied History and Communication Sciences in Vienna and then Historical Auxiliary Sciences, followed by a PhD in History. He worked for the Austrian Academy for many years in different projects and functions, before joining the University of Vienna as Senior Lecturer in 2023. He specializes in the early Middle Ages, focusing on communication and networks around the Mediterranean. Questions of identity and alterity have been at the core of his research, as well as the career of Louis II of Italy and the papacy.
is a Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Cambridge and, from 2024â27, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at the American Academy in Rome. Her research interests are in the archaeology and history of Italy and the Western Mediterranean. She works on cities in the early Middle Ages, and the intersections between people and their environments. Among her recent publications is Cultivating the City in Early Medieval Italy (Cambridge, Eng., 2021).
Robert Heffron
is an independent researcher. His PhD was funded by the Wolfson Foundation and awarded by the University of Sheffield in 2023. His research interests include gendered experiences of urban spaces and places, sex-based segregation and domestic seclusion, and comparisons between cities in the Eastern and Western halves of the Roman world. Chronologically, his work focusses on the period of late antiquity, c. 300â c. 600 A.D.
Julia Hillner
is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bonn and previously held a chair in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield. She completed her PhD at the University of Bonn in 2001. She specializes in the social history of late antiquity, especially the family and the household, crime and punishment, gender and women, and the city of Rome. She is the author of Jedes Haus ist eine Stadt: Privatimmobilien im spätantiken Rom (Bonn, 2004), Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Eng., 2015), and Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire (Oxford, 2023).
Mark Humphries
is Professor of Ancient History at Swansea University. He has published widely on early Christianity and late antiquity, particularly on the transformation of cities (especially Rome) and the ideological implications of usurpation in the later Roman Empire. He is a general editor of the Liverpool University Press series, Translated Texts for Historians.
Paul S. Johnson
is an archaeologist and geophysicist with a primary focus on Roman sites in the UK, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. He holds a PhD in Roman Archaeology from the University of Southampton. He has been a member of several major international research project teams and has published widely, especially on Roman townscapes and urbanism. He is one of the Directors of Magnitude
Maijastina Kahlos
is docent at the University of Helsinki and works as a principal researcher at the University of Lisbon. Her research interests broadly include migration and mobility in the ancient Mediterranean world, Graeco-Roman religions, and the Christianization of the late Roman Empire. She is the author of Religious Dissent in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2020), Forbearance and Compulsion: The Rhetoric of Tolerance and Intolerance in Late Antiquity (London, 2009), Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures, c. 360â430 (London, 2007), and Vettius Agorius Praetextatus (Rome, 2002). She has coedited Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150â700 CE (Cambridge, Eng., 2022).
Paolo Liverani
studied Classics at the âLa Sapienzaâ University of Rome and obtained his PhD in Ancient Topography in 1991. His main research interests include the ancient topography of Rome, Latium and Etruria; Roman state art; polychromy of ancient Roman sculpture; spolia; history of the archaeological collections and museums of Rome. He was Curator of Classical Antiquities at the Vatican Museum and since 2005 has been Professor of the Topography of Ancient Italy at the University of Florence. He is currently Chairman of the Department of History, Archaeology, Geography, Fine and Performing Arts. He is a member of the Academia Europaea, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and several other academies and research institutes.
Markus Löx
studied Classical Archaeology, Ancient History, and Byzantine Art History in Munich and Bochum. After a travel grant awarded by the German Archaeological Institute for his dissertation on Damasus and Ambrose, he has held various positions at the universities of Heidelberg, Munich, and Regensburg. Since 2020, he has been a Curator at the State Collections of Antiquities and the Glyptothek in Munich. Since 2024, he has also been working as a consultant for antiquity at the museum education centre in Munich. He is interested in the urban history of Rome and Milan, the development of the cult of saints, and the visual culture of late antiquity.
is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is a specialist on the social and cultural history of the city of Rome and the Western Mediterranean in Late Antiquity, and has published on late antique housing, honorific monuments and civic life, and the history of poverty. He is the author of Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome (Oxford, 2019), and co-editor of Lived Spaces in Late Antiquity (London, 2024) and The Epigraphic Cultures of Late Antiquity (Stuttgart, 2017).
Federico Marazzi
is Professor of Christian and Medieval Archaeology at the Department of Human Sciences at Suor Orsola Benincasa University, Naples, and director of the Post-Graduate School in Archaeology jointly run by the Suor Orsola Benincasa University and the Università della Campania âLuigi Vanvitelliâ. He has also taught in several other universities in Italy (Pavia, Palermo, Milano Cattolica) and abroad (UEA (Norwich), Copenhagen, Tunis). His main research topics are Rome and the papacy and monasteries and their archaeology between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Maya Maskarinec
is a historian of early medieval Europe and the Mediterranean with an emphasis on the city of Rome as an interlocutor across geographical, cultural and chronological divides. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Southern California and the author of City of Saints: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2018) and Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome (Philadelphia, 2025). Her research interests include urban history, hagiography and historiography, legal history, and the afterlife of Romeâs Christian and classical heritage.
Silvia Orlandi
is Associate Professor in Latin Epigraphy at âLa Sapienzaâ University of Rome since 2006. One of her main research fields is the epigraphic materials of the Colosseum. She also studies the history of epigraphy, and the Renaissance collections of antiquities, with particular attention to the epigraphic manuscripts by Pirro Ligorio. In recent years, much of her attention has focused on digital technologies applied to epigraphic research. She is one of the scholars responsible for the online Epigraphic Database Roma and was the coordinator of the European project EAGLE (European network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy), funded by the European Commission (2013â16). Since
Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani
is Professor of the Urban Archaeology of Rome and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Roma Tre. He has directed many excavations in Rome, among them those in the imperial fora and inside the Colosseum. His main research interests are the transformation of cities in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the topography and the urban and social landscape of Rome, and residential buildings. His most relevant publications on these topics are Roma nellâAltomedioevo â Topografia e Urbanistica della città dal V al X secolo (Rome, 2004), Edilizia residenziale in Italia nellâAltomedioevo (Rome, 2011) and Roma altomedievale. Paesaggio urbano, società e cultura (Rome, 2023).
Kristina Sessa
is Professor of History at Ohio State University. She is a social and cultural historian of late antiquity, with a new research focus on environmental history. She is the author of The Formation of Papal Authority in Late Antique Italy: Roman Bishops and the Domestic Sphere (Cambridge, Eng., 2012), Daily Life in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Eng., 2018), co-edited A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy (Leiden, 2016), and is presently writing a monograph on disasters.
Lucrezia Spera
is Professor of Christian and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and Professor of Christian Topography of Rome at the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. She is particularly interested in the urban transformations in the late antique and early medieval periods and in the Christianization of spaces. She has participated in and directed archaeological excavations and contributed to numerous and varied national and international congresses and conferences. She has published about 200 scholarly works and studies.
Francesca Romana Stasolla
holds a Laurea in Lettere, with specialisation in Archaeology, and a PhD in Archaeology and Post-Classical Antiquities from âLa Sapienzaâ University of Rome, where she now teaches as Full Professor and director of the Dipartimento di Scienze dellâAntichità . She has directed numerous archaeological projects, including the excavation of the medieval city of Cencelle (Tarquinia, Viterbo). She is currently excavating at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Her research interests range from late antiquity to the Middle Ages and focus on social archaeology, with in-depth studies on the dynamics of urban development, the monastic world, and funerary practices. She is the author of over
Michela Stefani
was awarded her PhD by the University of Roma Tre. Her research focuses on the transformation of Rome between late antiquity and the Middle Ages. She has undertaken archaeological excavations in Rome at the Colosseum and the Forum Pacis. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna, the Germanic Archaeological Institute in Rome, the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, and Università degli Studi dellâInsubria.
Francesca Tinti
is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU. Her research interests span a range of different but related topics, including early medieval religious history, documentary cultures, travel, languages and identities, and relations between England and the European continent, especially Rome. She is the editor of the volume England and Rome in the Early Middle Ages: Pilgrimage, Art and Politics (Turnhout, 2014) and the author of Europe and the Anglo-Saxons (Cambridge, Eng., 2021).
Dennis Trout
was Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems (Berkeley, 1999) and Damasus of Rome: The Epigraphic Poetry (Oxford, 2015). With Virginia Burrus and Marco Conti, he is a co-author of the Lives of Saint Constantina: Introduction, Texts, Translations, and Commentary (Oxford, 2020). Up to the time of his death in October 2025, he was working on a book entitled Reimagining Rome: Emperors, Popes, and the Cult of the Saints, the first comprehensive study of the inscribed Christian poetry of late ancient and early medieval Rome.
Andrea A. Verardi
is an Associate Professor of Church History at the Pontifical Gregorian University. Since 2022, he has also held a visiting researcher position at the University of Helsinki. He earned his PhD in Church History from the University of Rome Tor Vergata in 2013, with a dissertation on the genesis of the Liber Pontificalis. His research interests include Rome in the early Middle Ages, the papacy in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, early medieval canonical collections, the interplay between history, law, and written memory, and the socio-institutional aspects of authorship in the Carolingian era.
is a Curatorsâ Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri â Kansas City. His fields of interest encompass the history of the late Roman empire and the phenomenon of the barbarian migrations. He has also widely published in the areas of late antique Latin literature and historiography. His scholarly production includes a biography of King Theodahad (Toronto, 2014) and one of Queen Amalasuintha (Philadelphia, 2017), and a co-edited edition of the Anonymus Valesianus II (Paris, 2020).
Giorgia Vocino
is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de recherche et dâhistoire des textes at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris. She works on practices of learning in the early Middle Ages and is particularly interested in the study of early medieval textual communities and networks of knowledge. Her fields of expertise are textual criticism, manuscript studies, medieval literature and cultural history.
Veronica West-Harling
is an Associate Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, and has also taught at the University of Venice and âLa Sapienzaâ University of Rome. Her most recent book, Rome, Ravenna and Venice, 750â1000 (Oxford, 2021), focuses on a comparison of the cultural, social and ideological identities of those three cities. She has also worked on family, power, and memory in Italian female monasticism between 700 and 1100. She is currently working on tenth-century Rome, its topography of power, society and culture in the urban landscape, and the role of aristocratic women.
Sarah Whitten
is an Assistant Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She received her PhD in history from UCLA in 2010. Her research focuses on how violence re-shaped legal relationships and boundaries in medieval Southern Italy. She has published articles in Viator and Early Medieval Europe as well as multiple book chapters in collections about Norman material culture, incarnation and slavery in the Middle Ages, and interdisciplinary approaches to early medieval history. She is currently working on a monograph about how vulnerable people, including women and the enslaved, utilized Southern Italian legal systems to respond to instability.