After completing an undergraduate degree in Classics at New College, Oxford, I spent two years working as the Classics Teaching Fellow at Marlboro College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont (USA). I then moved to Princeton University where I wrote my PhD on ancient female prophetic voices. Back in the UK, I spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Bristol University’s Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition. I subsequently taught as a lecturer in Latin literature at Balliol College, Oxford for two years, before joining the department of Classics at King’s in 2012. Since then my teaching and research has contributed to both the Classics and the Liberal Arts degree programmes.

Research interests

• Music and the reception of Classics
• Epistolography, i.e. the writing of letters
• Greek and Latin poetry, with a focus on the late Republican and early Imperial Roman eras

My research stems from a fascination with language, translation, and forms of communication that transcend conventional boundaries. I have published on ancient Greek and Roman fiction about women with supernatural vocal powers, including prophets, witches, and ghosts. My book, Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature (Cambridge 2019, now out in paperback), explores the riddling but highly creative speech of a mythic prophetess who was cursed to see into the future, but never to be believed.

More recently my research has turned to focus on how modern music can give ancient myths from Greece and Rome a contemporary and global relevance, and how composing and performing music creates communities of creativity, healing, and activism. I would be delighted to supervise any doctoral work that focuses on musical receptions of Classics.

For more details please see my full research profile.

Teaching

I teach modules for the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees associated with the King’s department of Classics and with the King’s programme in Liberal Arts, including the MA in Global Cultures and the intercollegiate MA in Classics. Some of my modules are based on reading Latin prose and poetry in the original language, and others focus on studying Greek and Latin literature in translation, building an understanding of the ancient texts within their historical context and within broader cultural traditions.

Expertise and Engagement

I have been involved in many outreach projects in collaboration with partners such as Radio 4, the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, the Glyndebourne Festival, Mumsnet Academy, and Eidolon online journal. I am currently collaborating with a contemporary composer and librettist in writing a new opera based on the story of Penelope, from Homer’s Odyssey. You can learn more about this project on our website.

I work closely with schools in the London area and beyond. I offer talks on A and AS level topics in Latin and Classical Civilisation, as well as more general talks on aspiring and applying to study at university.

Selected publications

Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature. Cambridge University Press (2019, paperback 2022)

‘The music of Iannis Xenakis’ estranged Kassandra’, Classical Receptions Journal 14.1 (2022) pp. 70-88

‘Homer “viewed from the corridor”: epic refracted in Michael Tippett’s King Priam’, in Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century, ed. F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, S. Harrison and C. Kenwood. Oxford University Press (2018) pp. 289-304

‘Finding asylum for Virginia Woolf’s classical visions’, in V. Zajko and H. Hoyle (eds.) Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology. Wiley Blackwell (2017) pp. 271-84

‘Inventa est blandae rationis imago: Visualizing the Mausoleum of the Flavii’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 143 (2013) pp. 171-211

‘And the gods dread to hear another poem: The Repetitive Poetics of Witchcraft from Virgil to Lucan’, Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 68 (2012) pp. 103-43