Staff Profiles

I grew up in Yorkshire and read Classics at Durham University, before moving to Oxford to research a doctorate on the late-antique reception and transmission of the lost works of the Roman polymath Varro.

Following my doctorate I taught ancient history at St Benet’s Hall in the University of Oxford, before joining the ERC-funded ‘Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators’ project at the University of Glasgow in 2015. From 2017 lectured on a part-time basis in Classics at Glasgow and oversaw postgraduate researcher development training across the university.

In 2020, I moved to the Republic of Ireland to take up a lectureship in Classics at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and in 2021, was appointed Research Fellow with the ERC-funded ‘Fragments of the Republican Roman Antiquarians’ project at University College London. In 2024, I joined the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University as Lecturer in Classics.

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research

I am interested in the literature and intellectual history of the Roman Republic and Empire, particularly the scholarship of Republican and early Imperial Rome, and Ancient science and mathematics. I am also fascinated by fragmentary literature, ancient pedagogy, the history of the book, and the history of science and scholarship.

I am currently working on an edition of Suetonius, On Insults and their origins (Περὶ βλασφημιῶν καὶ πόθεν ἑκάστη) and am Principal Investigator of a two-year AHRC-funded project, The Agrimensores and Roman Mathematics (AgRoMa), which will produce an edition of the mathematical texts transmitted with the corpus of Roman land-surveying treatises, including the De iugeribus metiundis and the collection of problems ascribed to Epaphroditus and Vitruvius Rufus. For an accessible introduction to the AgRoMa project and the Roman practical mathematical tradition, see Newcastle University's FROM blog.

Postgraduate Supervision

I am happy to supervise prospective PhD students in the areas indicated above, and more broadly in topics related to the intellectual history of the ancient world.

I am currently supervising two PhD students:

• Eleanor McEvedy (Newcastle), 'The poetics of Light in Apollonius' Argonautica'.
• Daisy Dorrington (Newcastle), 'The Literary She-Wolf: An Analysis of the Representation of the lupa in Latin Literature'.

Teaching

2025/26:

CAH2009: Portfolio in Ancient History

CAC3000: Dissertations

2024/25:

CAC1014: Tragedy, Comedy, History: The World of Greek Literature

CAL1011: Intermediate Latin Language and Literature 1

CAG1001: Beginners' Greek in Action Part 1

CAC2069/3069: Ancient biography

CAC3000: Dissertations

Selection of Recent Publications

‘New Light on the History of the Codex Arcerianus and the Fate of Varro’s De geometria and De arithmetica’, Revue d’Histoire des Textes 19 (2024): 187–232.

‘The Catalogus geometrarum from the Corpus Agrimensorum. Part I: Text, Translator, and the Aratean Tradition’, Mnemosyne 76 (2022): 664–694. (Link here)

‘The Catalogus geometrarum from the Corpus Agrimensorum. Part II: The Biography of Euclid the Mathematician’, Mnemosyne 76 (2022): 837–856. (Link here)

‘Saturae Menippeae and Varro Menippeus’, Paideia 77 (2022): 175–201. (Link here)

‘Suetonius the Bibliographer’, in S. Adams (ed.), Scholastic Culture in the Hellenistic and Roman Eras: Greek, Latin, and Jewish (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019): 119–146.

with C. Gray, A. Balbo, and C. Steel (eds), Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

‘Varro, Atticus, and Annales’, in V. Arena and F. Mac Góráin (eds), Varronian Moments. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 60.2 (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2017): 61–75. (Link here)

‘“Bi-Marcus?” The two Varrones of Augustine and Nonius Marcellus’, Res publica litterarum 39 (2016): 180–203.