About
I am a Classicist and Ancient Historian with a special interest in the languages, history and literature of Late Antiquity.
After my first two degrees in Canada, I moved to Edinburgh for my PhD. My doctoral research examined the shifting practices and attitudes toward classical education in late antique Gaul, exploring the role classical schools of grammar and rhetoric played in Gallo-Roman politics and society, and how this changed in response to the transformations and upheavals of the late antique West. The resulting monograph (Learning and Power in Late Antique Gaul: Classical Education and the End of Roman Rule) was published with Cambridge University Press in 2026. The book explores the uses of education in a society. How is education valued by communities, governments and by individuals, and how does this change in response to political, religious, and cultural upheavals? I argue that, without the superstructure of the Roman empire, the socio-political culture that valued literary education disappeared, and the schools soon followed suit. Pushing back against conventional narratives of the period, I show that it was not primarily material changes caused by the political, military and religious upheavals of the fifth century that led to the decline of classical schools, but rather the marked changes in the attitudes towards education and learning of the emerging power brokers of post-imperial Gaul: the barbarian kingdoms and the Church.
Before coming to Liverpool in 2026 to begin my ERC-funded project GREEKWEST, I held postdoctoral research fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford (2021-2026) and at Ghent University in Belgium (2020-2021).