Marco Dosi (KCL) - 2017-18 Students
marco.dosi@kcl.ac.uk

Reconsidering the political relatioships of Odovacar and Theodoric with Constantinople

I am by training a classical archaeologist and historian focused in the Late Roman History but, as said by a great art historian, I firmly believe the Western civilization is one and cannot furthermore be rigidly divided into a web of unconnected disciplines. How could one study the history of the mankind without knowing what is a human being? I believe only what we are can explain why we take some choices, and this is perhaps why a historian (in the broadest sense) cannot refrain from necessarily being (a bit) psychologist, anthropologist and sociologist. Since my early years as BA student I always sought to broaden my knowledge by attending extra-curricular modules (e.g. Social Anthropology) or conferences and labs where I was able to meet people from different areas of study, with different opinions and methodologies. This led me to have interests ranging from archaeology to linguistics, to travel and read a lot. My research interests lie essentially on the crisis of the fifth century, the Fall of Rome (with close attention to the history of the historiography about the year AD 476) and the social and political processes which affected the disintegration of the western empire and the formation of post-Roman Europe. In particular, in the last year I have especially focused my attention on official ideology and propaganda in the reigns of the East Roman emperors Zeno and Anastasius, thereby aiming for understanding the political, cultural and social roots of the scarcity of references to an end of Rome in early Byzantine literature. Thanks to generous support from LAHP, my PhD research project at KCL will be able to reconsider the political relationships of Odovacar and Theodoric with eastern Roman emperors, reviewing old theories and data through an entirely new methodology.