Research

I joined the faculty at UCLA in 2020 after completing a postdoc at Cornell University, a Ph.D. at Princeton University, a post-baccalaureate at Columbia University, and a BA in Liberal Arts at Sarah Lawrence College. My interests range broadly within the world of ancient Greek poetics, aesthetics, and reception.

My current book project, titled Epistemologies of Suffering: Tragedy, Trauma, and the Choral Subject, argues that tragedy uses the formal fluidity of lyric expression and the peculiar nature of the chorus’s subjectivity to represent and fashion meaning from moments of extreme violence and intimacy. I have also written on the dreamscapes of the ancient Greco-Roman body and the sublime soundscapes of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. I have forthcoming work on poetry and profit in the work of Anne Carson, the mythic landscape of the Philoctetes, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis as a text of queer liberation.

Another significant branch of my research is concerned with investigating classical antiquity through the sometimes intersecting lenses of queer theory and queer identity, with a particular interest in Sappho and contemporary art. I have been developing a series of projects in this area under the rubric of “Deep Lez Philology.”

I teach on ancient Greek language, literature, and culture at the graduate and undergraduate level, including courses on tragedy, sex and gender, and the large GE lecture course “Classics 10: Discovering the Greeks.”