I study the houses of ancient Athenian tragedy, especially in relationship to the Greek family unit,unnamed the oikos.  As an ACLS Early Career Fellow in 2023-24 I will complete my book,  The House in Greek Tragedy: “If the House Would Take a Voice.” … “What is a house and what does it do?” is a question close to the heart of this ancient art form, where houses host infestation and suffer violence, conduct memory and feeling, and structure human relationships within families and even states. These dynamics, I show, underpin other dramatic activities of tragic houses–which “know,” “keep silent,” “fall sick,” “grow hair,” “take a voice,” “shout,” and are the earliest progenitors of the Gothic haunted house in their bold and uncanny personifications.

Far from a backdrop, the tragic house has enjoyed not only a lively ancient theatrical career but a broad and meandering reception. The House of Greek Tragedy will offer modern audiences tools to envision what the house can do and express theatrically. Close readings of seven plays attune readers to an original audience encounter, supported by a lexicon for the house’s social historical, poetic, and theatrical performance–distilled from all extant dramas.

In addition to articles on Greek tragedy, I have written theater reviews, a scholarly article on reception, and public-facing work on ancient drama and motherhood. Pursuing a growing interest in live theater, I have recently acted in a production of Terence’s Phormio and produced the premier staged reading of Mr. BLUE!, a drama based on Myles Connolly’s 1928 novel. I received my PhD from the UVA Classics Department in 2017 where I was Harrison Family Jefferson Fellow (2011-16) and worked with Jon Mikalson, David Kovacs, and Jenny Strauss Clay. I studied at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 2007 and was a curatorial intern in Ancient Art at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore in 2008.

From 2017-2022 I worked with faculty-run, interdisciplinary St. Anselm Institute for Catholic Thought at University of Virginia. I designed curriculum, taught, and facilitated seminars that drew together a wide variety of UVA students and faculty, connecting a variety of ancient ideas and texts with some traditional and many less conventional interlocutors through such topic of inquiry as “Friendship: Ancient and Modern Ideas,” “Faith and Reason in the Modern University,” and “Beauty and the Catholic Imagination.” Participants were marked by curiosity that is “catholic” (“throughout the whole”– that is, open to integrating truths wherever found, including the inspiration of the Catholic intellectual tradition).

I inhabit my own energetic ‘oikos‘ in Charlottesville, Virginia alongside my husband Daniel, also a Classicist, and four children. Experience at home, as well as in the garden and watercolor painting, shape a scholarly vision and practice that I aspire to be hospitable, patient, and fine-grained.