SAMUEL COHEN Sonoma State University Studying Disaster in Late Antiquity: An Introduction to the Special Issue, Bishops, Barbarians, and Responses to Crisis ABSTRACT This introduction frames a collection of four papers, originally presented at the 13th Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity conference, that examine late antique episcopal responses to disaster, typically military defeats caused by the barbarians. To contextualize what follows, this essay begins by introducing various ways disaster researchers define disaster, as well as the related concepts of hazard and vulnerability. The paper also examines several terminological and methodological challenges associated with the application of modern disaster studies to the ancient world. Importantly, disasters cannot be separated from their social context. Indeed, thinking of disasters as social phenomena encourages historians to look beyond the disaster events themselves, to consider why and how those in power reacted (or failed to react) and what the experience was like for the individuals who lived through them. Finally, this essay serves as an argument against the simplistic association of the period of Late Antiquity with disaster. KEYWORDS disaster, crisis, Late Antiquity, bishops This special volume of Studies in Late Antiquity has its origins at the 13 th Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity conference held in March 2019 at Claremont McKenna College. Responding to the conference’s theme, com- munal reactions to local disaster, presenters considered a variety of topics including how communities constructed meaning following traumatic events, how images of catastrophe served literary or rhetorical purposes, and even whether historians have overstated the impact of disasters, especially the Justinianic Plague, on the late antique Mediterranean. The diversity of approaches taken to the study of Roman disasters by conference presenters raises a difficult terminological question that was not explicitly addressed: what, exactly, is a disaster? 1 Scholars working in the fields 1 . In addition to a catastrophic event, disaster in colloquial English can refer to something that is either unsuccessful or that has a bad outcome. For example, it would be possible to say that an 1 Studies in Late Antiquity, Vol. 8 , Number 1 , pp. 1 –11 . electronic ISSN 2470 -2048 © 2024 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://sla.ucpress.edu/content/permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10 .1525 /sla. 2024 .8 .1 .1