I am currently Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge; a Visiting Researcher on The Agrimensores and Roman Mathematics (AgRoMa) at Newcastle; and a college lecturer in Classical Languages at Magdalen College, Oxford.
I work on the languages, literature and intellectual history of the Greek and Roman world, with a particular focus on how linguistic approaches can help us understand technical and non-canonical texts, and on how knowledge was organised and transmitted. I am also interested in how adapting methodologies developed in other disciplines can help us ask new questions of ancient evidence. More details on the different strands of my research are given below.
If any of this overlaps with your own work, or if you would like to collaborate on something, then please get in touch!
Ancient science and the structure of technical knowledge
My PhD examined ancient practical mathematical writing in Greek and Latin, with a particular focus on ancient ‘problem texts’ and their structure. I am currently working on being able to categorise the linguistic structures of these problem texts, focusing on the mathematical material preserved alongside the writings of the Roman land surveyors in Latin, and Greek geometrical papyri and pseudo-Heronian collections in Greek. I am also interested in the social and material contexts of the production of these texts, and their manuscript history, while a parallel strand of work examines the paratextual and information-organising devices of ancient technical texts. I am co-authoring an edition and commentary of the Latin material as part of the AgRoMa project at Newcastle University, with Dr Richard Marshall.
Linguistic variation and social history
My work often uses linguistic methods to attempt to address historical and literary questions that resist other approaches. One instance is the active scholarly debate on textual production in antiquity, particularly surrounding shorthand, the agency of enslaved workers, and what counts as authorship. I am currently trying to use approaches at the intersection of traditional philology and classical linguistics to uncover features of surviving texts that are conditioned by how they were produced, and to use those features to recover something about the linguistic or social context of a particular community. A particular interest is the use of dictation and shorthand to produce ancient texts, and the impact on the finished texts and the interpretative questions that should be asked of them.