Personal Biography
I studied Classics with Oriental Studies (Akkadian) at Oxford as an undergraduate, and completed my graduate work at King’s College, Cambridge. I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Copenhagen (2012–13) and Trinity College, Cambridge (2013–17). From 2014 I lectured in Classics and Ancient History at Durham University, before joining Corpus in 2020.
Research and Teaching
My research interests lie in the cultural and intellectual histories of the ancient Greek world and Mesopotamia, with a particular focus on the Hellenistic period (331–31 BC) when Alexander the Great’s conquests and their aftermath transformed the Mediterranean and Near East. My work examines how those transformations affected cultural and intellectual life from Athens to Babylon, and in turn, how local traditions were supported, co-opted or suppressed by Alexander’s successors in their competitive quest for imperial legitimacy. My first book, Between Greece and Babylonia: Hellenistic Intellectual History in Cross-Cultural Perspective (CUP, 2019) treats these questions as they apply to Greek and Babylonian scholarship. I have also worked on ancient libraries, Babylonian astronomy and astrology, and Hellenistic kingship.
I offer tutorials across the full range of ancient Greek history and historiography, and supervise MSt and MPhil students in Greek history. I welcome enquires from doctoral students working on all aspects of Hellenistic history and culture, or interactions between the Greek world and the Ancient Near East.
Selected Publications
Between Greece and Babylonia: Hellenistic Intellectual History in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Keeping Watch in Babylon: The Astronomical Diaries in Context, edited with Johannes Haubold and John Steele (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
‘Empire begins at home: local elites and imperial ideologies in Hellenistic Greece and Babylonia’, in M. Lavan, R. Payne and J. Weisweiler (eds.) Cosmopolitanism and Empire, 65–88 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
‘From Herodotus to a “Hellenistic” world? The eastern geographies of Aristotle and Theophrastus’, in E. Barker, S. Bouzarovski and C. Pelling (eds.) New Worlds out of Old Texts: Developing Techniques for the Spatial Analysis of Ancient Narratives, 121–152 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
‘The Antiochus Cylinder, Babylonian scholarship and Seleucid cultural patronage’, JHS 134 (2014): 66–88.