Jonathan P. Conant will be joining the faculty as assistant professor in the fall of 2011. His research focuses on the interregional integration of the Mediterranean and the transition from antiquity to the middle ages. His book, Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439-700 (Cambridge University Press, in production), represents the first historical examination of the fate of Roman identity in the region of modern Tunisia and Algeria after the collapse there of Roman power, from the Germanic Vandals’ capture of the territory in the early fifth century, through the sixth-century Byzantine reconquest, down to the Islamic invasions of the Maghrib in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. He has also written shorter pieces on the dissemination of North African saints’ cults into medieval Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire, on rural literacy in late fifth-century North Africa, on documentary practice in late Roman Africa, and on the North African Jewish community under the Vandal regime. His second book, tentatively entitled The Carolingians and the Ends of Empire, ca. 751-888 seeks to reassess the Carolingians’ understanding of the aims and responsibilities of empire in light of their wide-reaching external relations and of the long-term survival of Roman ideas in the medieval West.