I studied for my BA at the University of Warwick, where I graduated first in my year and completed a dissertation on the Roman novel's interactions with Greek fiction, supervised by Prof. Simon Swain. After that I completed an MPhil and then a PhD funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) at King's College, Cambridge, both supervised by Prof. Simon Goldhill. My PhD thesis, entitled ‘Fraud, Forgery, and Falsehood: Theories and Practices of Fiction in the Ancient Novel’, argued that far from being a passive generic by-product, the ancient novels actively engage with concepts of fiction found in earlier literature and scholarship, and that novelistic fiction becomes a vehicle for the contemporary political and cultural concerns of the Roman empire.
After graduating in 2017, I worked as a Language Teaching Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, and I was also a Director of Studies at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. I then joined UGent in January 2020. During this period I organised conferences on Heliodorus' Aithiopika (December 2018), fiction in ancient epistolography (December 2019) and researched fiction in imperial texts as diverse as Dio Chrysostom, the pseudonymous letters of Chion of Heraclea, and the fragmentary novels of Iamblichus and Antonius Diogenes.
My main research interests are in novelistic fiction and its reception in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. My research seeks to balance the scanty, often dubious, explicit references to the novel in late antiquity with the richer but more slippery implicit intertextual references which run throughout late antique literature. By collating and analysing these testimonia to the ancient novel in this broad-ranging way, my research hopes to integrate novelistic scholarship with late antique and Byzantine scholarship in a ways rarely seen previously, and to explore how these different receptions of the novels as fictional texts shape and were shaped by their literary contexts. I have recently worked on the fourth and fifth century contexts of reception for Heliodorus' Aithiopika, in particular its engagement with fiction as a concept, and I am currently looking at the reception of novelistic fiction in the ninth-century patriarch Photius' Bibliotheca, and how this impacts his role as the primary source for the fragmentary novels of Iamblichus and Antonius Diogenes. I am also exploring Musaeus' Hero and Leander (likely sixth century CE) and its reception of Chariton's Callirhoe.
