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My research focuses on Latin literature of the late Republic and early Empire. In particular, I'm interested in the origins and development of scientific writing at Rome and the experience of the sublime. My first book is The Scientific Sublime in Imperial Rome: Manilius, Seneca, Lucan, and the Aetna. It explores how the sublime impacts the formulation of scientific ideas and shapes the representation of the study of nature in Latin texts of the first century C.E., and will be published by Oxford University Press (online Nov. 2024, hardcopy Jan. 2025). In the spring of 2022, I organized a conference on the sublime that took place at Dartmouth. A volume based on the conference and co-edted by me is currently under review at Brill. I am currently working on a second book about the history and socio-political functions of catasterism narratives in the Roman world. Shorter pieces in the works include papers about the Elder Pliny ("Pliny's Natural History and the Scientific Sublime), Ovid ("Flood, Fire, and the Augustan Sublime in Ovid's Metamorphoses"), and the sublime in Neronian and Flavian literature.
"Time Stood Still, and It Was Sublime (Proto-Gospel of James 18)." In Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature, ed. K. Gilhuly and J.P. Ulrich, Routledge, 2024, 205–25.
"The Classical Sublime." In The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime, ed. C. Duffy, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 17–28.
"An Image Sublime: The Milky Way in Aratus and Manilius." In Teaching Through Images: Imagery in Ancient Didactic Poetry, ed. J. Strauss Clay and A. Vergados, Brill, 2022, 82–104.
"Homer redivivus? Rethinking the Transmigration of the Soul in Ennius's Annals." Arethusa 54 (2021): 185–220.
Book project: The Scientific Sublime in Imperial Rome: Manilius, Seneca, Lucan, and the Aetna.
This book charts the role of the sublime in first-century debates about how and why we investigate the natural world. The sublimity of the study of nature—in other words, the scientific sublime—is an animating force in Manilius, Seneca's Natural Questions, Lucan, the Aetna, and, in the book's epilogue, the Elder Pliny. These authors work with, and sometimes against, multiple traditions of ancient philosophy and ancient science, including early Greek natural philosophy, Stoic and Epicurean physics and meteorology, and mathematical astronomy and astrology. Despite this shared intellectual background, each author inflects the scientific sublime differently, and even though they do not explicitly theorize the sublime, they repeatedly juxtapose competing modes of sublimity and push readers to think about their relative merits and social functions. As the nature of Roman imperium and public life evolve, the scientific sublime figures the experience of infinite and unending empire, functions as an antidote to the corrupting influences of the seamy present, collapses under the weight of its own pretensions, and makes way for the appreciation of wonders that we cannot comprehend, the spectacle of nature. From this perspective, the scientific sublime constitutes a medium of philosophical communication and debate that fuels a vital current of Latin literary production. This book, then, tells a new story about the study of nature at Rome, locates the sublimity of that study at the center of early imperial Latin literature, and thereby renders the classical sublime more expansive, dynamic, and contested.