Research

As a literary critic and cultural historian of the Greco-Roman world, I study the politics of literature, the history of knowledge, and gender and sexuality in antiquity. Throughout my work I also examine how ancient ideas about the past have influenced modern ideas about classical antiquity, from fantasies about the Great Library of Alexandria to ideas about the origins of ‘Western Civilization’.

My dissertation, Imagined Histories: Hellenistic Libraries and the Idea of Greece, radically rethinks the history of libraries in the Greco-Roman world, and with it the legacy of classical antiquity today. Although scholars view the Library of Alexandria as the first great library in antiquity, almost everything we know about the library was written centuries after its foundation by people who reimagined and romanticized the past. Could one of the most important symbols of classical antiquity be a mirage? Starting from a simple observation—that material evidence for other, less famous Hellenistic libraries predates evidence for the Library of Alexandria—I explain how libraries actually developed during the Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE), and why ancient authors subsequently rewrote this history. Through close readings of literary texts and reconstructions of epigraphic and archaeological evidence, this interdisciplinary study contends that the histories of Hellenistic libraries, actual and imagined, have shaped ideas about Greece, Rome, and the supposed origins of Western civilization.

My forthcoming peer-reviewed article, “Language and Agency in Sappho’s Brothers Poem,” reads a new fragment of the Greek lyric poet Sappho through a feminist lens. Although scholars claim that the ‘Brothers Poem’ dramatizes women’s lack of agency in archaic Greece, I argue that, by adapting traditional masculine discourse, Sappho depicted women as agents of their own destiny. The article was awarded the 2020 John J. Winkler Memorial Prize, a prize for new scholarship exploring risky topics and employing innovative methods in classical studies.

Current research projects include several articles on libraries and the history of alphabetization; a major piece reexamining Sappho’s audience and her relationships with women through the lens of feminist and queer theory; and an international conference, titled “National literature before the nation-state," on literature as a means of constructing national identity in the premodern world.