Education and Degree(s):

• Ph.D., Duke University, 2005
• M.A., Duke University, 2000
• M.St., Oxford University, 1996
• B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995

About

Research Interests:

• Late ancient social and intellectual history; conceptions of the natural and the wondrous in antiquity
• Literary cultures of late antiquity and the early middle ages
• Performance, ritual, and performing objects in late antiquity
• Premodern notions of gender, sexuality, and the body

Courses Taught:

• CLA 003 Rome and the Ancient Mediterranean World
• CLA 004 Late Antiquity
• CLA 190 (senior seminar) Race and Classical Antiquity
• CLA 200A The World is Old: Approaches to the Classical Past
• LAT 112 Cicero
• LAT 130 Later Latin
• RST/JST 40 New Testament
• RST 102 Christian Origins
• IST 8C Religion and the Cosmos: Plato to C.S. Lewis

Profile:

I'm interested in how late ancient people imagined their world(s), and in the techniques they used--scientific, artistic, literary, religious--to more fully describe and inhabit the worlds that they imagined living in.  I'm also interested in how we can imagine those worlds, and so my work explores different techniques that we can use, from literary composition to installation art to object performance, to have a contemporary version of the kinds of imaginative experiences that late ancient people may have had.

Selected Publications:

"After Post, or, Animal Religion in an Age of Extinction," Ancient Jew Review, May 29, 2018 (link)

"Marvelous Things Heard: On Finding Historical Radiance," The Massachusetts Review 58.3 (2017): 478-91 (pdf)

Melania: Early Christianity Through the Life of One Family, co-edited with Caroline T. Schroeder, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016

Late Ancient Knowing: Explorations in Intellectual History, co-edited with Moulie Vidas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015

Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.