Associate Professor and Chair
pazdernc@gvsu.edu

Greco-Roman political and legal history/
late antiquity/classical historiography

BA Cornell University
MPhil University of Oxford
MA, PhD Princeton University

Full Graduate Faculty standing

Pew Teaching Excellence Award, 2005
Junior Fellow, Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005-06
Winner (representing Classics), inaugural GVSU Life Raft Debate, February 2011
Faculty of Distinction Award, GVSU Circle of Omicron Delta Kappa National Leadership Honor Society (ODK), 2011-12

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Editor, Book XII, in progress for The Code of Justinian: A New Annotated Translation, with Parallel Latin and Greek Text, translated by Justice Fred H. Blume (Cambridge University Press)

“Late Antiquity in Europe (c. 300-900 CE),” in progress for The Cambridge World History, Volume IV: A World with States, Empires and Networks, 1200 BCE-900 CE (Cambridge University Press)

‘How then is it not better to prefer quiet, than the dangers of conflict?’: The imperial court as the site of shifting cultural frontiers, forthcoming in Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Ashgate Publishing)

Paying attention to the man behind the curtain: Disclosing and withholding the imperial presence in Justinianic Constantinople, in Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (de Gruyter)

'The trembling of Cain':  Religious power and institutional culture in Justinianic oath-making, in The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity (Ashgate Publishing)

Fortune's laughter and a bureaucrat's tears: Sorrow, supplication, and sovereignty in Justinianic Constantinople, in Tears in the Graeco-Roman World (de Gruyter) [link]

Xenophon's Hellenica in Procopius' Wars:  Pharnabazus and Belisarius, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies [link]

Justinianic ideology and the power of the past, in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge University Press) [link | link]

Justinian's Novels and the law of succession, in Confrontation in Late Antiquity:  Imperial Presentation and Regional Adaptation (Orchard Academic)

Procopius and Thucydides on the Labors of War: Belisarius and Brasidas in the Field, Transactions of the American Philological Association [link | link]

Odysseus and his Audience: Odyssey 9:39-40 and its Formulaic Resonances, The American Journal of Philology [link | link]

'Our Most Pious Consort Given Us by God': Dissident Reactions to the Partnership of Justinian and Theodora, Classical Antiquity