Biography
After a failed attempt to become a professional ice hockey goalie, I studied at the University of North Carolina as a Morehead Scholar and then at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. I first came to Cambridge as the WHD Rouse Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Christ’s College and returned for good after serving as Leventis Research Fellow in Ancient Greek at Merton College, Oxford.
Thanks to the generosity of the Leverhulme Trust, I will be on research leave from October 2025 to October 2027.
Research
Greek Literature (especially poetry)
Publications
Pindar and the Poetics of Permanence (OUP, 2018).
With Adrian Kelly: Texts and Intertexts in Archaic and Classical Greece (CUP, 2024).
With Giacomo Fedeli: Writing Literary History in the Greek and Roman World (CUP, 2024).
The Cambridge Companion to Pindar (CUP).
‘Placing Aphrodite: Alcaeus fr. 296b and Horace C. 4.1’: ZPE 189 (2014): 53-63.
‘Alcman 3 PMGF and Horace C. 2.8’: ZPE 192 (2014): 23-8.
‘Zeus and the Maidens: Pindar fr. 94b.31-7’: ZPE 192 (2014): 31-3.
‘Alcaeus 140’: CPhil 110 (2015): 353-60.
‘Simonides 21 IEG2’: ZPE 200 (2016): 33-5.
‘Sappho 44: Trojan Myth and Literary History’: Mnemosyne 70 (2017): 740-57.
‘Borrowing Sappho’s Napkins: Sappho 101, Catullus 12, and Theocritus 28’: HSCP 109 (2017): 237-60.
‘Reading Agamemnon’s Mind in Euripides’ Hecuba’: Omnibus 73 (2017): 15-18.
‘Event and Artefact: The Hymn to Apollo, Archaic Lyric, and Early Greek Literary History’: in Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece ed. F. Budelmann and T. Phillips (2018): 151-71.
‘Heirs and Educators: Pindar in the Epitaph for Bion’: Hermes 146 (2018): 107-9.
‘Alcaeus’, ‘Alcman’, ‘Ibycus’: The Literary Encyclopedia (www.litencyc.com).
‘Pindar and the Epic Cycle’: JHS 138 (2018): 182-201.
‘Schools, Reading and Poetry in the Early Greek World’: CCJ 65 (2019): 150-72.
‘The View from Olympus: The Muses’ Song in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo’: CQ 72 (2020): 1-9.
‘The Odyssey and its Predecessors’: Omnibus 81 (2021): 6-8.
‘Staging Literary History in Old Comedy’: CPhil 116 (2021): 305-35.
‘Of Armpits and the Origins of Comedy: Aristophanes fr. 264 and 265’: GRBS 61 (2021): 249-62.
‘Classicising “Pindar”: Quotation, Canonisation and Early Reception’: Trends in Classics 13 (2021): 363-88.
‘Theognis’ Unoriginal Didactic Failure’: in Phaidimos Hektor. Studi in onore di Willy Cingano per il suo 70mo compleanno ed. E. Prodi and S. Vecchiato (2021): 133-54.
‘Alcaeus’: in The Blackwell Companion to Greek Lyric ed. L. Swift (2022): 275-89.
‘Xenophanes’ Poetic Travels’: AJP 144 (2023): 503-28.
'Alcidamas and the the Idea of Literary History: P. Mich. Inv. 2754': CPhil 118 (2023): 440-58.
‘Epic and Lyric’: in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Epic ed. E. Greensmith (2024): 41-57.
‘“If One Knows What is to Come”: Ethics, Audience, and Eschatology in Pindar’s Olympian 2’: JHS 114 (2024): 1-17.
With Shaul Tor: ‘Heraclitus on First (and Further) Hearings’: Phronesis 69 (2024): 383-401.
With Giacomo Fedeli: ‘Introduction’ in Fedeli and Spelman (2024): 1-17.
‘Writing the Beginnings of Greek Literary History’: in Fedeli and Spelman (2024): 21-39.
With Adrian Kelly: ‘Introduction’: in Kelly and Spelman (2024): 1-28.
‘Invoking Homer: The Catalogue of Ships and the Early Reception of the Iliad’: in Kelly and Spelman (2024): 118-37.
‘Xenophanes B6 D-K: Ethics, Reciprocity, and the Mystery of the Travelling Meat’: CQ (2024).
Teaching and Supervisions
I would be delighted to hear from potential research students interested in similar aspects and areas of early Greek literature.
