Thomas S. Burns | |
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| Born | June 7, 1945 |
| Nationality | American |
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| Main interests | "Barbarian"-Roman relations |
Thomas Samuel Burns (born June 7, 1945) is an American historian who is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emeritus of Late Ancient and Medieval History at Emory University. He specializes on relations between "barbarians" and Romans in classical antiquity.
Thomas S. Burns was born in Michigan City, Indiana on June 7, 1945. He received his A.B. (1967) from Wabash College and his M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1974) from the University of Michigan. His thesis was supervised by Sylvia L. Trupp and John W. Eadie.
After gaining his Ph.D., Burns served as Assistant Professor (1974-1980) and then Associate Professor (1980-1985) of History at Emory University. Since 1985, Burns was Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Late Ancient and Medieval History at Emory University (1985-2010). He was Chair of the Department of History at Emory University in 1989-1992 and 2006-2007. Burns retired as S. C. Dobbs Professor Emeritus in 2010.
Burns specializes in late ancient and early medieval history and archaeology. He is particularly interested in relationships between "barbarians" and Romans. Burns is well known as an authority on the Ostrogoths.
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The Ostrogoths were a Roman-era Germanic people. In the 5th century, they followed the Visigoths in creating one of the two great Gothic kingdoms within the Roman Empire, based upon the large Gothic populations who had settled in the Balkans in the 4th century, having crossed the Lower Danube. While the Visigoths had formed under the leadership of Alaric I, the new Ostrogothic political entity which came to rule Italy was formed in the Balkans under the influence of the Amal Dynasty, the family of Theodoric the Great.
Theodoricthe Great, also called Theodoric the Amal, was king of the Ostrogoths (471–526), and ruler of the independent Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy between 493–526, regent of the Visigoths (511–526), and a patrician of the East Roman Empire. As ruler of the combined Gothic realms, Theodoric controlled an empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Adriatic Sea. Though Theodoric himself only ever used the title 'king' (rex), some scholars characterize him as a Western Roman Emperor in all but name, since he ruled large parts of the former Western Roman Empire, had received the former Western imperial regalia from Constantinople in 497, and was referred to by the title augustus by some of his subjects.
Flavius Odoacer, also spelled Odovacer or Odovacar, was a soldier and statesman of barbarian background, who deposed the child emperor Romulus Augustulus and became King of Italy (476–493). Odoacer's deposition of Romulus Augustulus is traditionally seen as marking the end of the Western Roman Empire as well as Ancient Rome.
The Western Roman Empire comprises the western provinces of the Roman Empire at any time during which they were administered by a separate independent Imperial court; in particular, this term is used in historiography to describe the period from 395 to 476, where there were separate coequal courts dividing the governance of the empire in the Western and the Eastern provinces, with a distinct imperial succession in the separate courts. The terms Western Roman Empire and Eastern Roman Empire were coined in modern times to describe political entities that were de facto independent; contemporary Romans did not consider the Empire to have been split into two empires but viewed it as a single polity governed by two imperial courts as an administrative expediency. The Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, and the Western imperial court in Ravenna was formally dissolved by Justinian in 554. The Eastern imperial court survived until 1453.
Samuel Candler Dobbs was president (1919-1920) and chairman of The Coca-Cola Company, from 1919 to 1922.
Thomas Robert Shannon Broughton, FBA was a Canadian classical scholar and leading Latin prosopographer of the twentieth century. He is especially noted for his definitive three-volume work, Magistrates of the Roman Republic (1951-1986).
The Sack of Rome on 24 August 410 AD was undertaken by the Visigoths led by their king, Alaric. At that time, Rome was no longer the capital of the Western Roman Empire, having been replaced in that position first by Mediolanum in 286 and then by Ravenna in 402. Nevertheless, the city of Rome retained a paramount position as "the eternal city" and a spiritual center of the Empire. This was the first time in almost 800 years that Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy, and the sack was a major shock to contemporaries, friends and foes of the Empire alike.
Ernst Badian was an Austrian-born classical scholar who served as a professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1998.
William Ragsdale Cannon was the dean of Candler School of Theology (1953-1968) and an American bishop of the United Methodist Church, elected in 1968.
Peter John Heather is a British historian of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Heather is Chair of the Medieval History Department and Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He specializes in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Goths, on which he for decades has been considered the world's leading authority.
Arther Ferrill, now a professor emeritus of history at the University of Washington at Seattle, is a respected expert on Ancient Rome and military history. He has written four books and is a regular contributor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and other periodicals, as an author and in review of other authors.
Tim J. Cornell is a British historian specializing in ancient Rome. He is Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester, having retired from his teaching position in 2011.
Walter Goffart is an American historian who specializes in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years in the History Department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto (1960–1999), and is currently a senior research scholar at Yale University. He is the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery, late Roman taxation, four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.
Dan Reiter is an American political scientist. He is currently the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at the Department of Political Science at Emory University.
Cynthia Willett is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, where she is also affiliated faculty with Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and with the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. She has written influential books on intersectional feminism and founded Emory's Institute for the History of Philosophy. Willett was on the American Philosophical Association's Executive Board between 2008 and 2010, and has served as co-director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. She earned her Ph.D. in 1988 from Pennsylvania State University.
Paul Harold Rubin is an American economist and the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics Emeritus at Emory University. He was President of the Southern Economic Association in 2012-2013. He is also a research fellow at The Independent Institute.
Stephen D. White is an American historian. White graduated from Harvard University in 1965 with a bachelor's degree. In 1972, he earned his PhD in history with a study of Edward Coke. White taught history at Harvard from 1968 to 1970, history and literature for the two years following. From 1972 to 1975 he was a lecturer at Harvard University. From 1975 to 1980, White taught as Assistant Professor of History, then Associate Professor of History from 1980 to 1985, and Professor of History at Wesleyan University from 1985 to 1989. From 1982 to 1983 he was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study. White has been teaching since 1989 as the Asa G. Candler Professor of Medieval History at Emory University, where he was appointed Director of Studies in 1991. In 1993/94 he was a visiting professor at the University of St Andrews and was appointed a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and of the Medieval Academy of America.
Thomas Robert Flynn is an American philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at Emory University. He is a former president of the Metaphysical Society of America (2011).
