I am a first-generation student from a dairy farm in rural New South Wales. I discovered Classics in the first year of an undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Sydney and changed course almost immediately. I stayed on in Sydney for a BA in Ancient Greek and Ancient History and an MPhil in Classics and Ancient History, after which I came to Cambridge as a Gates Scholar where I read for a PhD in Classics at Corpus Christi College.

I work primarily on the Greek literature of the Roman Empire. My current work explores the ways in which these texts challenge, complicate, and sometimes cooperate with the vision of “empire without end” that featured so prominently in the propaganda of the Augustan (and post-Augustan) empire. I am working on a book about the seacoast in the imperial Greek geographical imagination and beginning a second book on the new vision(s) of the cosmos generated by the Christian intellectuals of late antiquity.

I am also interested in the complex relationship between Christianity and “Paganism” in this period and am thinking ahead to a larger project on the religious dimension of imperial Greek literature. In addition to this, I am involved in two collaborative book projects: on ecotonal spaces in imperial Greek literature (with Estelle Strazdins, Australian National University) and ecocritical approaches to ancient literature (with Jason König, University of St Andrews).