My work concerns how poetry was interpreted and how authority was granted to texts in the ancient Mediterranean world. Among the Greeks, a fairly stable canon of poetic texts was crucial to elite self-definition and identity: particularly in the melting pot of Hellenistic and Roman imperial polities, to be a real Greek was to know Homer. But the same texts could be read in different ways. My work follows the development of interpretive tropes and technologies like allegory, etymology, and the ascription of divine inspiration to authors, alongside the genres of commentary and monograph that sprang up to assist readers and teachers. My doctoral thesis describes this tradition for Hesiod, the ‘other’ archaic epic poet in the Greek imagination after Homer. At Clare I hope to produce a comparative history of poetic exegesis between polytheists and Christians in late antiquity, bringing in material from the Semitic languages as well as Greek, and from the schools of Antioch, Nisibis, and Gaza no less than those of Athens and Alexandria. I am also creating a critical edition of certain commentaries on Hesiod that survive in mediaeval manuscripts on the Continent.
A native of Richmond, Virginia, I took a BA and MA in classics at Yale University, where I sang Slavic and Georgian a cappella and chaired a debating society. After a wonderful year as a Latin schoolteacher, marred by the pandemic, I arrived in the UK in 2020 for another master’s in Ancient Greek at the University of Oxford, where I served as the organ scholar for St Edmund Hall. Defecting to Trinity College, Cambridge for my PhD, I coxed for the First and Third Trinity Boat Club and remain a menace to swans everywhere.
 

Department webpage