Profile

Broadly speaking, I am interested in the literary cultures and societies of archaic and classical Greece, as well as their reception in modern and contemporary worlds. 

For my DPhil (Oxford, 2023), I wrote a dissertation on the fear-theme in Aeschylus’ tragedies. I showed that for Aeschylus, as for his classical contemporaries, ‘there is a place where fear is good’ (Eum. 517); and it is the work of culture – including philosophy, historiography, and religion, as well as tragedy – to educate our fears for the benefit of the polis. This vision of fear as a healthy and educable passion accords with some recent philosophical, sociological, and neuroscientific accounts of emotional cognition. It also has implications for contemporary politics, and particularly the communication of the climate crisis. I am developing the thesis, in discussion with OUP, for potential publication in late 2024.
 
Meanwhile, I have this summer published a co-edited volume on The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens (Routledge, 2023); this book explores the ways in which mental processes are embodied and represented by cultural artefacts before a technical terminology (phantasia, etc.) became established. My own chapter addressed the dramatic articulation of Pelasgus’ deliberation in Aeschylus’ Suppliants

At the ICS, I am working on a piece about choral panic, and another on the dramatic elements of the Eleusinian mysteries. My main postdoctoral project, however, is an exploration of the figure of Io, and her various roles in tragedy, historiography, and visual art, from archaic Greece to the present day. I am interested in Io’s paradigmatic function, tracing the tragic limits of human experience, and human knowledge, as she stumbles through the remotest regions of the ancient world, and into unexpected corners of modernity.