My classics habit started at high school, where I studied Latin under the sign of the infectious enthusiasm and total madness of the late Dr Emily Matters. I went on to do my honours degree at the University of Sydney, with Dr Frances Muecke and Dr Emma Gee; I then upped sticks to the UK, where I developed a vitamin-D deficiency and somehow managed to defy it to gain an MPhil (2009) and PhD (2013) from King's College, Cambridge (working with Prof. John Henderson and Prof. Chris Whitton).

From there I spent a year unemployed or part-time employed in non-academic roles, slowly working my way into the precariate with a one year post at Trinity College Oxford (2013-14) and a ten month post (2014-15) at the University of Bristol. I eventually settled with a British Academy Postdoc and a lectureship (then senior lectureship) at the University of St Andrews. I loved teaching and researching at St Andrews, and in 2021 I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize, largely made possible through the wonderful academic environment in Scotland. It's important to acknowledge that my career has had many rough patches as well as bright spots, and that the bright spots are often a trick of the light played by various structural advantages.

During my time in the UK, I also spent long research stints abroad, at Harvard (2017/18), and then most recently at the Sebastiano Timpanaro archive in the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (2021/22). I lived in Livorno, one of Italy's lesser-known gems, the port city where the Italian communist party was born in 1921. That history is just as important to me as the things that happened to happen in the ancient Mediterranean; and that history continues to inflect the way I read the deeper past.  

After many years wrapped in a gore-tex jacket, I'm thrilled to be thawing back in Australia and working with my brilliant colleagues to build a new generation of ANU classics and classicists. I consider myself an outward-facing Latinist, in the discipline but not bound by it, so if you ever want to come chat about anything - literature, art, politics - in English or in my barely grammatical Italian, my door's always open.

• Imperial literature from c. 40 BCE to c. 200 CE, mainly Latin, Greek on a good day
• Authorship
• Slavery and literary production
• Roman satire
• Anonymous texts, literary and less literary
• Marxist criticism
• History of the 20th century left
• Materialism
• Critical antiquities
• Classical reception, esp. in high modernism, and contemporary women’s writing
• History of classical scholarship and its relationship with the political left
• Historicism, formalism, and the various conflicts within each
• Intertextuality and its limits
• Autobiography and self-fashioning
• History of literary criticism in 20th century, esp. the fortunes of ‘close reading’
• Working with uncertainty

I have two main projects on the boil right now, both collaborative in nature. The first is called The Elephant in the Study: Working Latin Literature for the Enslaved. This project, funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, aims to get to grips with an embarrassing and previously skated-over scandal about how classical Latin literature was produced: usually, with an enslaved literary secretary (or secretaries) in the room making various contributions such as taking dictation, reading text aloud, taking notes, making edits, copying, compiling, researching, discussing. Recent research has propelled our knowledge by light years, such that we are now relatively certain of the depth, range and extent of these enslaved contributions to Latin literature. What remains to be done is metabolise these findings to work out how such a unique mode of literary production formed Latin literature, and can account for some of its strangeness. Dan Zhao, a brilliant expert in Roman slavery and manumission, has now joined me on the project as postdoctoral fellow, and we are co-authoring a piece on enslaved secretaries writing their freedom into their enslaver's wills through forgery.

The second project is called the Critical Antiquities Network. Founded in 2020 by co-founders and co-directors Tristan Bradshaw (University of Wollongong) and Ben Brown (University of Sydney), this network has spotlighted some of the most innovative work happening in the crossover between classical studies and critical theory in recent years. In 2025, I joined the team as a co-director. Our job in this phase of the network is to articulate what we see as the promise of critical antiquities as an approach, namely using various (not necessarily classical) antiquities as a way of framing a critique of the present, and making that present strange via the alterity of the past. Tristan and Ben have some wonderful forthcoming work in this space, which can be found here. I've also just recently published a book powered by a broad critical antiquities agenda, Major Corrections: An Intellectual Biography of Sebastiano Timpanaro (Verso, 2025). The network is launching some exciting new ventures this year, including a reading group on 'transformative action in the face of debt' (culminating in an assembly on the same topic) and the Studio for Critical Antiquities, a new space for early career scholars to air and hone their radical work. Please visit the website for more details - and feel free to email us to get involved, if the work rings true!

Other than this, I'm pumped to be contributing chapters and papers to many great projects run by brilliant colleagues and friends, among which: a chapter on the Vandal-era Carthaginian poet Luxorius for The Vandal Renaissance (co-edited by Michael Hanaghan, Katherine Krauss, Richard Miles, Paul Roche and Anne Rogerson), a chapter (co-authored with Jemima McPhee) on the anonymous poem Aetna for Not Knowing in Antiquity (co-edited by Lea Niccolai and Giulia Maltagliati), and a chapter (co-authored with Joe Howley) on latent forms of corporate authorship in Virgil's Georgics for author.net (co-edited by Sean Gurd and Francesca Martelli). Collaboration is very important to me, so if you ever want to workshop an idea or try writing something together, get in touch! But maybe not between May 2025 and May 2026 - when my collaborative energies will be fully directed (with my partner) towards keeping a very small fresh human alive.