I am an associate professor in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Berkeley, where I am also on the faculty of the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. I am affiliated with the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion and the Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies. I previously taught at the University of Cincinnati and I was educated at Trinity College Dublin and Harvard.

I study Roman history from the period of the late Republic to Late Antiquity, particularly the entangled histories of religion and cultural life in the empire. I find myself particularly preoccupied by the history of religious change, the sociology of knowledge, and, increasingly, the history of temporality. These interests have led me to also write on the history of Judaism in antiquity and the history of ideas in early modernity.

I am currently engaged in two book projects. For some time now, I have been at work on a book tentatively titled Roman Futures: An Essay in Cultural History. Against standard accounts that assume that Roman culture (and all pre-modern cultures) worked only with an attenuated sense of the future, the book sketches how Romans devoted great energy to the calculation and imagination of the time-to-come. Religion is a big part of this story, but so are economics and “science”. I have also recently started work on a short book for Cambridge UP, Religion in the Roman World, which will introduce advanced students and scholars in adjacent fields to the religious history of Roman worlds.

My first book, Legible Religion, was published by Harvard University Press in 2016. It argues that learned books that were written in the first century BCE by intellectuals like Varro, Cicero, Nigidius Figulus and a cast of Roman elites played an important role in the formation of the concept of “Roman religion”. As well as providing the first history of Roman books on traditional religion, I also address a much broader historical question of how we can understand the role of text in religion without relying on the concept of Scripture. I am committed to the idea that Roman history should involve deep engagement with both the textual and material evidence; Latin epigraphy, which is both, is a particular interest.

Some of my work is linked from the Publications section of the CV page on this site.