I earned my BA in Classics (Greek and Latin) and Anthropology (Archaeology) at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and my MA in the Art and Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2024, I completed my PhD in Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University, with a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. From 2020 to 2024, I was also a guest doctoral student at the Department of Romance Studies and Classics at Stockholm University. Since October 2024, I have been a postdoctoral researcher in the group “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations (FOR 2779).”

In my dissertation, entitled “How to Build Belief with Blocks: The Religious Affordance of Greco-Roman Funerary Inscriptions,” I described how the various affordances of inscribed objects (material, locational, acculturative, visual, verbal) facilitated belief in the extraordinary eschatological claims of inscribed grave epigrams among their viewers and readers. My thesis centered the ‘Cave of the Vipers,’ a 2nd century CE tomb for a Roman woman named Atilia Pomptilla (CIL X 7563–7578), as an extended case study for the explication of this model. In addition to my work on the religious affordances of grave inscriptions, my previous research projects have included Orphic-Bacchic mystery cults, Aeschylean tragedy in performance, and reception of Classical mythology in contemporary street art. 

• Ancient Mediterranean Religions
• Greco-Roman Funerary Commemoration and Eschatology
• Greek and Latin Epigraphy
• Narrative and Belief
• Materials and Materiality
• History of Ideas

My postdoctoral project, “Elysian Microtheologies: Urbanity and the Religious Affordance of Greco-Roman Funerary Inscriptions,” explores the way that urbanity affords the generation and maintenance of religious belief in new ideas about death and the afterlife. I focus on the way that inscribed Greco-Roman funerary monuments of the second and third centuries CE afforded belief in the imagined community of deceased, historical, Roman individuals in the Elysian Fields. I am developing the term ‘microtheologies’ to reconceptualize individual occurrences of Elysium in grave markers as concentrated and contextualized experiences of lived religion, rather than merely poetic borrowings or metaphors.

Journal Articles

• 2025. “Material Bricolage? The Re-use of Gold in the Orphic-Bacchic Gold Tablets.” In Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 26. (Forthcoming).
• 2022. “How to Become Immortal and Ageless: Affording Belief in Epitaphs with Extraordinary Claims,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 24, 281–30. Link to publication.
• 2020. “Myth on the Wall: Images of Antiquity in Contemporary Street Art,” 21st Century Popular Classics (New Voices in Classical Reception Studies CP 2), 69–86. Link to Publication.