His father was a Belgian diplomat, while his mother, born in Cairo, had French and Romanian-Jewish parents.
Just before the German invasion of Yugoslavia, they fled on the Orient Express, passing through Istanbul, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Cairo.
[2] 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).
Goffart was known as a strong critic of several traditional assumptions which are still common in history writing about the late Roman empire and the early middle ages.
He objects to terminology such as "Migration age", and "Germanic peoples", arguing that both these concepts presuppose old assumptions about a single systematic movement against the Romans.
To the extent that they were greedy and oppressive, Goffart argued that it was "in the finest tradition of the law-abiding Roman countryside [...] it created rural tyrants".
[9][10] 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".