Department of Classics, University of Toronto
My research focuses on ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and religion, as well as the intellectual history of Classics as a discipline. I am particularly interested in the knowledge practices of the Hellenistic and Imperial period that sustained genres and fields of study as diverse as Aristotelian problemata, commentary on Homeric epic, and ancient ethnographic literature. I am now working on a study of ancient Greek debates about the nature of myth and cult provisionally entitled After Aristotle and Before Theology: The Invention of Religion in Hellenistic and Imperial Greece.
Research related to commentary
I am currently preparing articles and chapters on ancient Greek commentary and kindred genres, especially as they relate to the interpretation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. In these studies, I read commentary through the lens of intellectual history. Although largely anonymous and difficult to date with any precision, ancient Greek commentary reveals not only scholarly practices and processes that perdured over centuries in major sites of scholarship in the ancient Mediterranean world, but also the tacit ambitions, desires, and anxieties of a scholarly community at pains to preserve their literary and cultural heritage in a rapidly changing world.
Publications
“The Politics of Dance: Eunomia and the Exception of Dionysus in Plato’s Laws,” CQ (forthcoming).
“Beyond Grand Theories and Family Resemblances: Toward a Discursive Approach to Greek Sacrifice,” Mètis: Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens (forthcoming).
“From Mythos to Logos: Jean-Pierre Vernant, Max Weber, and the Narrative of Occidental Rationalization,” Modern Intellectual History 14 (2017): 477–506.
“The Divination Contest of Calchas and Mopsus and Aristophanes’ Knights,” GRBS57 (2017): 910–934.
Translation (with introduction) of Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Rules of the Game in the Study of Ancient History” (“Le regole del giuoco nello studio della storia antica”), History and Theory 55 (2016): 39–45.