PhD, Columbia University 2025

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Roman republican history; Latin and Greek literature (especially poetry); ancient Sicily; war and cultural memory; landscape studies; naval and maritime history; visual and material culture; numismatics; history of collections; ancient drama and modern performance.

BIOGRAPHY

I am a classicist and scholar of the ancient Mediterranean, with an emphasis on the world of the Roman Republic. My research, broadly conceived, explores the intersections of cultural geography, landscape, and memory (especially in relation to violent conflict) in ancient literature and history, with a particular focus on the island of Sicily and its surrounding seas. My current book project considers the conceptualizations of Sicily in the Roman cultural imaginary from the mid-third century BCE to the first century CE. This project draws not only on Latin and Greek literary texts across genres (e.g., drama, oratory, epic, historiography, and scientific and didactic works) but also numismatic, epigraphic, and archaeological material, in service of answering the questions: what did Sicily—its landscape, its people, and its history—mean to the Roman cultural consciousness, and how did this change over the course of the three centuries following Sicily’s establishment as Rome’s first overseas province?

I received my B.A. in Classics from Reed College (2013) and my Ph.D. in Classics from Columbia University (2025), where I taught as a Preceptor of Literature Humanities in the Core Curriculum and as a Teaching Fellow in Classics. In my doctoral dissertation, I reevaluated the significance of the bellum Siculum and Sextus Pompey’s control of the island of Sicily during the second triumvirate and traced its influence in shaping cultural, political, and poetic responses to Rome’s first province in the triumviral and early Augustan periods. This study places Vergil’s ongoing engagement with Sicily at its center, reading these poetic texts with and against a range of visual and material evidence (including a large study of coin hoards), to reconstruct a more dynamic picture of contemporary attitudes to the war in Sicily and the island’s status during the 40s–20s BCE. My previous publications range in subject from the late antique poet Claudian’s de raptu Proserpinae to Hellenistic numismatics; I have also contributed to several digital projects, including resources and teaching materials for The Performance of Roman Comedy (sponsored by the NEH), as well as digital editions of unpublished Latin inscriptions for the U.S. Epigraphy Project.