About
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Advisor, Graduate Certificate in Classical Reception Studies
My main research interests are in Latin poetry and its reception.
My new book, Roman satire and the fall of Rome (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026), shows how the satires of Juvenal have shaped ideas about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Arguably, Juvenal was more popular than any other Roman author from the end of the fourth century CE; in another age when satire was all the rage, Juvenal's works were also admired by the historian Edward Gibbon, author of the most influential history of Rome's decline. Examining how Juvenal informed Gibbon's reading of his late antique sources, my book will draw attention to the role of this most insistently Roman poet in ancient and modern debates about the nature of Roman identity.
My first book, Transformations of Ovid in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2017), is the first monograph study of Ovid's presence in this neglected period of literary history. The chapters crisscross the Mediterranean—from late Roman Gaul to Vandal Africa and Ostrogothic Italy, and from the Merovingian kingdoms to the imperial court at Constantinople—exploring how various Latin poets responded to the experiences of isolation from Rome that Ovid had described in his writings from exile on the shore of the Black Sea.
In addition to the above, I have written a number of other articles on the reception of Roman poetry. I also have interests in the role of women as readers and writers of Latin literature, with one published essay on collaborative authorship in the elegies of Sulpicia. I am very happy to work with students at all levels who are interested in the intellectual lives of women in the Roman world.
Fields of Interest
- Latin poetry, especially Ovid, Virgil, and Juvenal
- Literature of late antiquity
- Campania
- Classical receptions
Select publications
- Roman satire and the fall of Rome (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026)
- Transformations of Ovid in late antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- 'Ostrogothic and Byzantine Italy', in Gavin Kelly and Aaron Pelttari (eds.), The Cambridge history of later Latin literature (Cambridge University Press, 2026) 1248–79
- 'Luisa Sigea: Syntra', with Fernando Gorab Leme, in Stephen Harrison and Gesine Manuwald (eds.), An anthology of neo-Latin literature written by women, 1350–1800 (Bloomsbury, 2026) 91–102.
