I'm in the middle of Mary Beard's SPQR. That's very different from the usual sorts of histories this "lay" person has read; they are usually narrative histories of a period, biographies of an elite person, or a look at a topic (Life in a Medieval Castle, for example). I have three totally unrelated questions.

(0) Is it OK to ping flaired users with a /u reference if I think the topic might interest them?

(1) Is her broad scope and style the current trend in academic history? For example, the attempt to look at non-elites did not surprise me, though I've rarely seen it in the old-fashioned books I've read; her thinking that it's worthless to bother looking at emperors between Tiberius and Commodus I found surprising.

(2) Sorry for the broadness here. I'd like a very brief high-level view just because I'm idly curious. What are some new notions or viewpoints in Roman historiography in the last few decades? From discussions here, I'm thinking that these are among the possibilities: looking at people who aren't elite; "Byzantines" are too Romans; the western Roman Empire fell before 476 / with Belisarius / with the Muslim conquests / didn't really fall but just mutated; climate and disease were more important than previously understood (or is that just a thing for Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome?)?