Michael Roberts has been teaching at Wesleyan University since 1980.  His primary area of research is the Latin poetry of late antiquity and he has published four books on that subject, Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity (Liverpool, 1985), The Jeweled Style:Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius (Ann Arbor, 1993), and The Humblest Sparrow:  The Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (Ann Arbor, 2009), as well as numerous articles.

Michael Roberts was born in Eccles (Greater Manchester) in the United Kingdom and received his B.A. from Cambridge University (St. John’s College) and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Before coming to Wesleyan he taught for two years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  At present his main project is an annotated translation and parallel text of the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus.