Michael Roberts, Robert Rich Professor of Latin emeritus, taught at Wesleyan University from 1980 till 2017. His primary area of research is the Latin poetry of late antiquity and he has published five 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), The Humblest Sparrow: The Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (Ann Arbor, 2009), and Venantius Fortunatus, Poems (edition and translation, Cambridge, MA 2017), 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. He is now turning his attention to a new project, a translation of Avitus of Vienne’s biblical epic, The Spiritual History, for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.