CU Classics scholar wins Guggenheim Fellowship

Noel Lenski, associate professor of classics, has won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, which he will use to advance an innovative view of the extent of slavery in Late Antiquity.

Lenski is the 73rd member of the CU-Boulder faculty—and the 66th member of the arts-and-sciences faculty—to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in the last six decades.

Lenski is a Roman historian who has focused primarily on the later empire and its aftermath. He holds master’s and doctoral degrees in classics from Princeton University.

A member of the University of Colorado faculty since 1995, he began his academic career focusing on emperors and has since shifted his attention to slaves.

Lenski is writing a book on slavery in Late Antiquity which he says will chart “the fate of this peculiar institution” in the period between roughly A.D. 300 and 600. “Previous studies have tended to posit a decline in slaveholding in this era, whether as a result of economic collapse or of Christianization,” Lenski writes.

“I will argue that there was no such decline, indeed that if anything, the military and political chaos of Late Antiquity led to an increase in the practice of slavery.”

He is the author of “Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century AD,” which won the 2005 Outstanding Book Award from The Classical Association of the Middle West and South.

He also edited the “Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine,” published in 2002, and is an editor on the forthcoming monograph “The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity.”

Lenski has won numerous awards, including a 2000 Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award. He has also served as chair of the Department of Classics.