Bryan Ward-Perkins lectures in History at the University of Oxford, and is Chair of the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity.  His principal research interests are in the late Roman and post-Roman worlds, from the perspective of both texts and material culture. He has written extensively on urbanism and the economy in the 4th to 7th centuries, including a short book which questions notions of a comfortable transition from Roman to post-Roman times: The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press 2005).  He is currently completing a major collaborative project on ‘The Last Statues of Antiquity’, which has published a searchable database of all the available evidence: http://laststatues.classics.ox.ac.uk/ .