About

Brian Swain

Kennesaw State University, History and Philosophy, Faculty Member

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Research Interests:
Roman History, Late Antiquity, Barbarian societies, Early Medieval History, Byzantine Studies, Goths, and 4 moreBarbarians, Jordanes, Ostrogoths, and Barbarians and Romans in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Agesedit
About:
Brian Swain is a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world. He teaches courses on the Greek, Roman, and medieval pasts and on pre-modern history more broadly. Swain received his doctoral training in Greek and Roman history, and he is a specialist in late antiquity (c. 300 - 700 AD), the liminal period that witnessed the transformation and eventual fall... moreBrian Swain is a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world. He teaches courses on the Greek, Roman, and medieval pasts and on pre-modern history more broadly. Swain received his doctoral training in Greek and Roman history, and he is a specialist in late antiquity (c. 300 - 700 AD), the liminal period that witnessed the transformation and eventual fall of the Roman empire and the emergence of the post-Roman societies of medieval Europe. His research focuses on the complex interactions between Romans and barbarians, and engages the questions of ethnicity and identity that arose from their cultural convergence. He has published papers on Jordanes, the sixth-century AD historian of the Goths, and on Ostrogothic Italy. His current book project, 'Empire of Hope and Tragedy: Jordanes and the Creation of Roman-Gothic History', is a study of Jordanes’ historical corpus, the Gothic War in Italy, and the nature of barbarian and Roman identities.edit
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This study offers a review of the complicated and intractable debates surrounding the question of Gothic identity in Ostrogothic Italy. There are various nuanced approaches, but ultimately there are those who believe that the Goths were a coherent collectivity with a distinctive Gothic identity, and those who think that such a thing did not really exist and that the notion of the Goths as “a people” is a rhetorical distortion of our sources. This study begins by tracing the politically fraught history of 19th- and 20th-century scholarship on barbarian identity and then sorts through the specific nodes around which contemporary debates have formed in the Ostrogothic context. Finally, some concluding remarks take stock of the heuristically beneficial results of these trenchant disagreements while also recommending ways to shorten distances between oppositional models.