About

Mark Lewis Tizzoni is an Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies and History, specializing in late antique and medieval studies. Tizzoni earned a B.A. in History and Latin at the University of Scranton and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. Tizzoni’s teaching focuses on the history of a broader, more globally-defined Middle Ages that centers Africa in wider Mediterranean and Afro-Eurasian worlds. Course offerings consider the Mediterranean world broadly, but give particular attention to the Maghreb, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, and the Iberian peninsula.

Tizzoni’s research focuses on the transformation of the Roman world in the fifth through seventh centuries CE. He is particularly interested in questions of identity, social cohesion, and how cultural production can be used to help understand and navigate times of drastic social change (such as those witnessed in the aftermath of the Roman Empire in North Africa). As an interdisciplinary cultural historian, Tizzoni employs late antique Latin poetry to engage with these questions, focusing on the collections that have survived from sixth-century North Africa and seventh-century Iberia. He is currently writing an open-access book with Kısmet Press entitled The Maghreb in Late Antiquity.

Before coming to Bates in 2020, he taught pre-modern African, Iberian, and United States history at Angelo State University in San Angelo, TX and worked as a professional horticulturalist in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Recent Publications:

“Christianity in Roman Africa, I: Communities and Religious Movements,” with Éric Fournier. In Handbook of African Christianity from Apostolic Times to the Present, ed. by Andrew Barnes and Toyin Falola. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

“Review: Caroline Goodson, Cultivating the City in Early Medieval Italy,” Speculum, 98.4 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1086/726871.

“Locating Carthage in the Vandal Era.” In Urban Interactions: Communication and Competition in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. by Michael Burrows and Michael J. Kelly. Gracchi Books, 2020.

“Teachers and Teaching,” with Sarah B. Lynch. In Cultural History of Education in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jo Ann H. Moran Cruz. Bloomsbury, 2020.

“Isidore’s early influence and dissemination (636-711).” In A Companion to Isidore of Seville, ed. by Andrew Fear and Jamie Wood. Brill, 2020.

Forthcoming Publications:

“Alterity in the Anthologia Latina: Gender, Race, and the (Patriarchal) State in Vandal Carthage.” In The Vandal Renaissance, ed. by Richard Miles et al. Brill, forthcoming.

“Between Originality and Classical Tradition: the Ars Poetica of Eugenius II of Toledo,” in Transforming the Early Medieval World: Studies in Honour of Ian N. Wood, edited by N. Kıvılcım Yavuz and Richard Broome. Kısmet Press, forthcoming.

“Constructing Culture and Community in Post-Roman Carthage: Rereading the Anthologia Latina.” In A Companion to North Africa During the Vandal Century, ed. by Éric Fournier. Brill, forthcoming.

“Poetic, epistolary, and scribal culture.” In A Companion to Visigothic Iberia, ed. by Damián Fernández, Molly Lester, and Jamie Wood. Brill, forthcoming.

“Seeking female experience in the verse of Vandal-era Carthage.” In Women and Gender in Late Antiquity, ed. by Maijastina Kahlos and Éric Fournier. Brepols, forthcoming.

“Transforming the Late Antique Curriculum: Eugenius of Toledo and Educational Culture in Visigothic Iberia,” in Reading Eugenius of Toledo, ed. Graham Barrett and David Ungvary. Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin. Brepols, forthcoming.