I study late antique and early medieval history, ca. 300–1000 CE. My research focuses above all on Northwest Africa and its connections to the rest of the world, across both the Mediterranean and the Sahara. I have a special interest in questions of identity, sanctity, the body, violence and trauma, interfaith interaction, captivity, language, peasant society, and documentary culture. My first book examines the fate of Romanness in North Africa between the Vandal and Islamic conquests (ca. 439–700); I am currently writing a monograph on the early middle ages for the Cambridge History of Europe series.

In my research, I explore the connectedness of the late antique and early medieval world. My writing focuses above all on Northwest Africa: the territory of modern Tunisia, Algeria, western Libya, and Morocco. My book Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in North Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 (Cambridge University Press, 2012) looks specifically at the fate of Roman identity in this region after the collapse there of Roman imperial power, from the Vandal war-band’s capture of the territory in the early fifth century, through the sixth-century East Roman or Byzantine “reconquest,” down to the Islamic invasions of the Maghrib in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. At the time, most studies of the early middle ages focused on the creation of new, non-Roman identities out of the encounter between provincial Romans and foreign (“barbarian”) migrants. By contrast, I looked at Romanness as a “cultural strategy,” or, in other words, as a set of ideas that allowed people to invoke a sense of shared identity or of profound difference as direct imperial control of the West collapsed. This strategy helped to sustain the Mediterranean’s cultural connectedness even as the empire fragmented politically. Because it was really good at doing that work, I argue, the idea of being Roman never really ceased to be fundamental among key elements of Mediterranean society, both in Africa and beyond, well into the medieval period. However, I also contend that what it meant to be Roman in the early middle ages was constantly changing. In Northwest Africa specifically, the Vandal conquest precipitated the emergence of three competing definitions of Romanness—political, cultural, and religious—all of which remained operational into the early Islamic era and beyond.

I have also written a series of shorter pieces on the how devotion to Christian saints spread from Africa to the rest of the Mediterranean and vice versa, on the abilities of fifth-century North African peasants to read and write and the uses they (and others) made of written documents, on Jewish experiences of the Vandal regime, on the different languages and linguistic communities that peppered late antique and early medieval North Africa, and on how experiences of violence and intergenerational legacies of trauma shaped Christian ideas of sanctity in both the late Roman and the medieval period. I have a side interest in the Carolingian empire too, and I have written about the ambitions of Louis the Pious (814–40) to act not just as emperor of the Frankish kingdoms, but of all Christians everywhere, and specifically in what is now southwestern Spain. I have also organized or co-organized a few conferences, one on the Byzantine-Islamic transition in North Africa, another on rural women and children in late antiquity and the early middle ages, and a third on the medieval body in comparative Afro-Eurasian perspective. Most recently, I have begun writing about the connectedness of Africa across the Sahara in the early medieval period.

I am currently working on two book projects. The first is a monograph on the early middle ages for the Cambridge History of Europe series, which explores cultural, social, intellectual, and political developments in Europe and the Mediterranean between the late Roman period and the era of the first Crusade. The second is a book on how early medieval people dealt with the psychological and emotional effects of violence.

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Books:

Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam, ca. 500–ca. 800. Co-edited with Susan T. Stevens (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2016)

Articles and Chapters:

“Languages and Communities in Late Antique and Early Medieval North Africa.” In Languages and Communities in the Late-Roman and Post-Imperial Western Provinces, edited by Alex Mullen and George Woudhuysen (Oxford University Press, 2023), 37–57

“North Africa under Byzantium.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1295

“Vandals.” In A Companion to North Africa in Antiquity, edited by R. Bruce Hitchner (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), 375–390

“Latinity in Early Islamic North Africa.” Eranos 112 (2021): 27–50

“Memories of Trauma and the Formation of a Christian Identity.” In: Memories of Utopia, edited by Bronwen Neil and Kosta Simic (New York: Routledge, 2020), 36–56

“The Forgotten Transition. North Africa between Byzantium and Islam, ca. 550–750.” Africa – Ifrīqiya. Continuity and Change in North Africa from the Byzantine to the Early Islamic Age, edited by Ralf Bockmann, Anna Leone, and Philipp von Rummel, Palilia 34 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019), 11–21

“Jews and Christians in Vandal Africa.” In Barbarians and Jews: Jews and Judaism in the Early Medieval West, edited by Yitzhak Hen and Thomas F.X. Noble, Diaspora 4 (Turhout: Brepols, 2018), 29–46

“Donatism in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries AD.” In The Donatist Schism: Controversy and Contexts, edited by Richard Miles (Liverpool University Press, 2016), 345–361

“Introduction: Re-Imagining Byzantine Africa.” Co-written with Susan T. Stevens. In North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam, edited by Susan T. Stevens and Jonathan P. Conant (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2016), 1–9

“Sanctity and the Networks of Empire.” In North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam, edited by Susan T. Stevens and Jonathan P. Conant (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2016), 201–214

“Anxieties of Violence: Christians and Muslims in Conflict in Aghlābid North Africa and the Central Mediterranean.” Al-Masaq. Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 27 (2015): 7–23 [Al-Masāq Article Prize 2017]

“Romanness in the Age of Attila.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Attila, edited by Michael Maas (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 156–172

“Louis the Pious and the Contours of Empire.” Early Medieval Europe 22 (2014): 336–360

“The Imperatives of Vandal Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Mediterranean.” In Guerrieri, mercanti e profughi nel Mare dei Vandali. Atti del convegno internazionale. Messina 7–8 settembre 2009, edited by Vincenzo Aiello† (Messina: Dipartimento si Scienze dell’Antichità dell’Università di Messina, 2014), 83–93

“Public Administration, Private Individuals, and the Written Word in Late Antique North Africa, c. 284–700.” In Laypeople and Documents in the Early Middle Ages, edited by A.J. Kosto, M. Innes, W.C. Brown, and M. Costambeys (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 36–62

“Europe and the African Cult of Saints, circa 350–900: An Essay in Mediterranean Communications.” Speculum 85 (2010): 1–46

“Private Documentation and Literacy in Vandal North Africa: The Case of the Albertini Tablets.” In Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique Africa, edited by A.H. Merrills (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2004), 199–224

Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2014

Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome, 2009-2010

Junior Fellowship in Byzantine Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., 2002-2003

Packard Fellowship, Harvard University, 2001-2002

Graduate Seminar in Numismatics, American Numismatic Society, New York, summer 1999

Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, 1997-2001

American Academy in Rome

Jonathan Conant's teaching focuses on the fall of the Roman Empire, the early medieval Mediterranean world, late antique North Africa, the empire of Charlemagne, and the Vikings.