Personal Statement
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).

Research Overview
My current research explores bilingualism between Greek and Latin in the late antique West.

At Liverpool I am PI of the project GREEKWEST (Greek in the West: language communities, migration and the transformation of society in western Europe, 300–700 CE). This project is funded by an ERC Starting Grant and will run from 2026-2031.

GREEKWEST aims to reconstruct the place of Greek in the sociolinguistic landscape of western Europe during Late Antiquity (300–700 CE). Integrating textual and epigraphic evidence, it traces the evolving use and knowledge of Greek in literary and political culture, religion, and daily life. This period witnessed transformations that would change the shape of European history: the rise of Christianity, the fragmentation of the western Roman empire, the introduction of new political and economic institutions, and the resulting restructuring of civic society. Views on the place of Greek in the late antique West still centre around deterministic narratives of ‘decline and fall’, leading to instances of Greek knowledge being dismissed as outliers, thus missing opportunities to examine the period’s continuing cultural, political, and linguistic interactions between ‘East’ and ‘West’. Challenging this consensus, GREEKWEST is ground-breaking in that it is the first study to examine Greek’s changing role in the late antique West and to do so across multiple social contexts. Spoken by roughly half the empire’s inhabitants, Greek had long occupied a central role in Roman society. On the one hand Greek was seen as a language of high culture and prestige, and educated elite Romans were expected to be bilingual in Latin and Greek. At the same time, Greek was often associated with people from less privileged parts of society: slaves, performers, and merchants. This project seeks a) to establish who knew and used Greek in the late antique West and from what sectors of society they came, b) to reconstruct the motivations for using and learning Greek, and c) to retrace how individuals and communities in the West learned and accessed Greek knowledge. This research will fundamentally change our understanding of the social history of language and migration, late antique intellectual and political culture, and the paradigms by which we view the transformations of the Roman world.