Randolph Ford is Assistant Professor of Ancient Studies. He received BA and MA degrees in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an MPhil and PhD from New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. His research and scholarship have focused primarily on the comparative study of history and historiography of the Greco-Roman world, especially in Late Antiquity, and the history and historiography of early medieval China and Central Asia. Prior to coming to UMBC, he has taught at the University of Notre Dame, State University of New York-Albany, and Skidmore College. His teaching has included courses on Classical Greece and the Hellenistic World, Republican and Imperial Rome, Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and frontiers in ancient China and Rome.
His current research project is a comparative history of the Chinese and Roman imperial traditions from c. 300 to 600 CE, a period when these two empires were faced with internal crises, foreign invasion, and territorial fragmentation. While these geographical regions have long been studied in relative isolation, Ford’s work aims to increase dialogue between scholars in traditionally separate fields by synthesizing and analyzing political and ideological trends at opposite ends of Eurasia in this period. His first monograph, Rome, China, and the Barbarians: Ethnographic Traditions and the Transformation of Empires (Cambridge) considers ethnographic and historiographical traditions in the late antique/early medieval period. He has also published on the Central Asian origins of the Northern Wei 北魏dynasty, which ruled northern China in the 4th to 6th centuries; the ethnographic significance of the emotion anger in Greek and Latin authors; and the 6th-century Getica of Jordanes.