Walter Goffart

More recently, the concept of a "Germanic" proto-Europe spread from Germanic studies to early medieval European studies, and was "recast in terms borrowed from constructionist anthropological approaches to ethnicity" into a "vision of an early Europe that was culturally and politically committed to ethnic politics", and Goffart criticized this trend in Barbarian Tides (2006), a work which was "more explicitly concerned than the earlier books with the historiographic framework that has shaped modern interpretations of the period".

In 1991 he received the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America, for his book, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800). Alexander C. Murray edited a Festschrift for Goffart called After Rome's Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (1999).

In 1982, Goffart became a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, of which he was a councilor in 1977–78. In 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was made a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London. Goffart was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies in 1973–74, and a Guggenheim fellow in 1979–80. He has been a member of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, the American Historical Association, and the Haskins Society.

Goffart has two children from his first marriage. He has been married to the medievalist Roberta Frank since 1977.

Goffart became a lecturer at the University of Toronto in 1960. He was made an assistant professor in 1963. In 1965–1966 he was a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He was appointed an associate professor at the University of Toronto in 1966, and a full professor in 1971. In 1967–1968 he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1971–1972 he was the acting director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, Toronto. In 1973–1974 Goffart was a visiting fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. He retired from the University of Toronto as a professor emeritus in 1999. Since 2000, he has been a senior research scholar in history at Yale University. In 2001 he had a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation study center in Bellagio and in 2015 at the Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa.

Goffart received his A.B. (1955), A.M. (1956), and PhD (1961) from Harvard University. From 1957 to 1958 he attended the École normale supérieure, Paris.

Goffart was in Belgrade in 1941, where his father was stationed. Just before the German invasion of Yugoslavia, Goffart and his family fled on the Orient Express. Passing through Istanbul, Beirut, Jerusalem and Cairo, they eventually, after 68 days at sea, reached New York City. Goffart became an American citizen in 1959.

Walter Andre Goffart (born February 22, 1934) is a German-born American historian who specializes in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years in the History Department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto (1960–1999), and is currently a senior research scholar at Yale University. He is the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery (Le Mans Forgeries), late Roman taxation (Caput and Colonate), four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.

Walter Goffart was born in Berlin on February 22, 1934, the son of Francis-Leo Goffart and Andree Steinberg. His father was a Belgian diplomat, while his mother, born in Cairo, had French and Romanian-Jewish parents.