Position<\/strong>: <\/strong>Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies <\/p>\n\n\n\n Degrees from<\/strong>: <\/strong>University of Leeds, M.A., Ph.D., in medieval studies and history; University of Scranton, B.A., in history and Latin <\/p>\n\n\n\n The spark<\/strong>: Classical and medieval studies is \u201cnot necessarily something that everyone just naturally goes into,\u201d Tizzoni says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Growing up, he had a cousin who was a history buff. \u201cWhen he would visit, we would talk about history. And he was very interested in the medieval period.\u201d That rubbed off on Tizzoni. By high school he was deep into Beowulf<\/em>, The Wanderer<\/em>, and The Seafarer<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From there, he was drawn to both classical studies and medieval studies. \u201cHomer also had that same sort of influence on me that Beowulf<\/em> did. That’s how I ended up with late antiquity \u2014 it’s that middle ground where the two things meet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seeking the unknown<\/strong>: “I’m a first-generation to college student. As a child, academia was this really strange, foreign thing to me, a world I had no knowledge of \u2014 whatsoever,” he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, he had, from an early age, “always wanted to be an educator. I wanted to really deal with material in-depth, in complexity, and in intricacies, and to work with students who want to do that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “That’s what set me on this path of the total unknown to become a college professor. And it worked. It doesn’t always!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n His work<\/strong>: <\/strong>\u201cI work on the transformation of the Roman world in the West, how it went from being Rome to the Middle Ages,\u201d Tizzoni says. \u201cI do this through the medium of poetry \u2014 how this transformation was affected and experienced by Iberians and North Africans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For a poet in the fifth century, North Africa was \u201cone of the best places to be. Carthage had a really vibrant intellectual culture. It was where a considerable portion of people from the Roman world would go for their education.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And by the late fifth century in North Africa, the Vandals had taken power from the Roman Empire, and the poetry that follows reflects existential questions: \u201cHow would they exist in this world where Rome was no longer in charge? Who were they going to be? What does that mean?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through their verse, which was performed more than read in an era when fewer people were literate, the poets \u201cwere building this essentially new and independent Vandal identity that set them apart from Rome, bringing the rest of the populace into this political project of the Vandals. There was great excitement as they were trying to forge these new identities.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Much of the poetry that Tizzoni is looking at was written in the last decade of the Vandal Kingdom. \u201cSo we don\u2019t know what would have happened\u201d had Vandal identity in North Africa had more time to develop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example? <\/strong>\u201cI work on a collection called the Anthologia Latina, <\/em>these really feisty, fiery, strange pieces. One poem is four lines, and the central piece is that there’s a monkey riding a dog. So weird stuff, but culturally relevant. That piece actually asserts a new cultural identity, a new ethnic identity, for the people of North Africa. There\u2019s advanced stuff happening in these poems that don\u2019t feel advanced.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why it matters right now<\/strong>: \u201cLate antiquity and the Early Middle Ages are very important in discussions of identity, and it’s actually at the forefront of a lot of discussions today. White nationalists have especially grabbed onto these ideas, using it to try to prop up their worldviews. And this needs to be countered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne way to fight this is not just to take down the Eurocentric stuff, but also to reassert the role Africans played in the Early Middle Ages. It\u2019s also important, broadly, to understand the ways people make a conscious effort to construct and build identity. That\u2019s happening in late antiquity, and that has wider implications today, as we construct what it means to be an American, or other such identities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIdentity isn\u2019t something that just exists in the world. We create it, from many different things, including poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why teach? <\/strong>\u201cI love bringing primary sources into class, especially things that I work on. It’s always a lot of fun to present the students with these strange little pieces of poetry and have them see how they’re historically significant and how you can actually break down pieces of import out of them, to understand the society that made them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new tenure-track assistant professor of classical and medieval studies, Tizzoni explains how fifth-century ideas about national identity are now being used by white nationalists to “prop up their worldviews. And this needs to be countered.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":135621,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[14,166,11009],"tags":[12201,10759],"class_list":["post-135619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-staff","category-humanities-history","category-the-college","tag-2020-tenure-track-2","tag-classical-and-medieval-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1005"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135619"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135965,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135619\/revisions\/135965"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Mark](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/09\/200803_Mark_Tizzoni_0089.jpg\")