Shane Bjornlie is the Andrew Heiskell Post-doctoral fellow in Classical Studies. Under a different sun, in southern California, Shane is Assistant Professor of Roman and Late Antique History at Claremont McKenna College, where he teaches for the Department of History at CMC and for the Intercollegiate Classics program of the Claremont Colleges consortium. In Rome, however, Shane is an AAR Fellow and historian interested in the confluence of political and literary culture at the end of the Roman Empire. Shane has focused this interest in work on a now completed book manuscript, Politics and Tradition between Rome, Ravenna and Constantinople: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae.
First and foremost, Shane has always been fascinated by how societies recognize and respond to their own processes of change in culturally specific discourses. The literary, documentary and material evidence for the end of the Roman Empire in Italy has provided him with a particularly rich field for the investigation of this topic. Shane’s book project examines the political context and literary background for the publication of a 6th-century collection of governmental letters (the Variae) by Cassiodorus, arguably the last Roman official to portray the imperial tradition in Italy. Cassiodorus published his epistolary collection at a time when the eastern Byzantine Empire attempted to wrest Italy from the control of the so-called barbarian Ostrogoths. Shane argues that this context and the forced convergence of concepts of “barbarian” and “imperial” in the contemporary political discourse conditioned the manner in which Cassiodorus portrayed traditional Roman political values in his letter collection.
Spending a year at the American Academy in Rome facilitated the completion of Shane’s book manuscript in a number of important ways. According to Shane, the Academy’s Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library is peerless in Rome and much of his work depended on the library’s rich collection of scholarly literature and primary sources. Modern Rome has also proven to be invaluable as a natural cross-roads for scholarly interest in Late Antiquity. As Shane noted, “If it is no longer the case that all roads lead to Rome, it is certainly true that all modern conversations and debates about the end of the Roman Empire converge here.” His book has benefited from a community of conversations found in academic colloquia and with colleagues at other international institutes throughout Rome. These ex situ conversations led to a number of invited public lectures (including Oxford University and the Central European University of Budapest) where Shane presented his work this year. The American Academy in Rome has also provided a launching pad for numerous excursions during which Shane explored the boundaries of the former “Ostrogothic” Roman Empire—including trips to Sicily and Calabria, Ravenna and Croatia and the various “encastellated” hill towns of central and northern Italy.
Shane’s book is now under review for publication and during his remaining time at the Academy, he has begun preparing conference papers for next year. Shane also finds time to enjoy Italian wines from the incomparable vantages of the Janiculum Hill, something that he does in the company of his family of fellow travelers, his wife Michelle and their daughters Adelheid, Aisling and Atia.