About

Overview of Work

At the end of an undergraduate degree in Classics (Harvard, 2010), a chance meeting with Syriac amulets and talisman-manuals planted the idea for a dissertation focused on late ancient and medieval Greek and Latin  magical texts which I  completed at Berkeley. What could these sometimes obscure, often pleasingly wrought and poetic texts mean to us? How could they arm the ancients against fortune's slings and arrows? More recently I have looked at the related sphere of astrology as another form of highly transmissible popular knowledge with a grounding in religious thought. Along the way, I've worked extensively with artifacts of manuscript cultures in many media—inscriptions on stone and amuletic gems and metal leaves, papyri, parchment and paper codices.

Research Positions


Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

  Institut für Wissensgeschichte des Altertums, ERC Advanced Grant ZODIAC

  Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, 2021


University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Faculty of Classics

Associate Researcher, 2021 –

Lexicon of Greek Personal Names

Researcher, 2016 – 2021


University of California, Berkeley, CA

  The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri

  Assistant to the Curator, 2013 – 2016

Education


University of California, Berkeley, CA

Ph.D. in Classics (and Medieval Studies, concurrent), May 2016

Dissertation entitled The Tradition of Greek and Latin Incantations and Related Ritual Texts from Antiquity through the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

M.A. in Classics (Latin emphasis), December 2011


Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

A.B. in Classics (Latin and Greek), May 2010. Magna cum laude with Highest Honors in Field and Foreign Language Citation in Classical Hebrew