A chance meeting with Syriac amulets and talisman-manuals in the final year of an undergraduate degree in Classics (Harvard, 2010) planted the idea for a dissertation focused on late ancient and medieval Greek and Latin magical texts (Berkeley, 2016). I was interested in the levels of meaning of these sometimes obscure, often pleasingly wrought and even poetic texts, and how they might have helped the ancients negotiate life’s anxieties and anticipations. A position as researcher at the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Oxford. 2016–2021) led me to explore a different aspect of ancient history: how trends in name-giving across a rigorously gathered corpus of ancient names can reveal the identity and mentality of people who would otherwise remain to the modern historian no more than a name. From the close study of this material, nuanced accounts also emerge of the interaction of Hellenic traditions with local ones, and of Greek with local languages—in the case of the two volumes of the Lexicon to which I contributed, in the Near East and Egypt in Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine times. More recently, in the context of the ERC Zodiac project, I have begun to look at a body of texts and practices related to my earlier interest in magic: astrology as another form of highly transmissible popular knowledge with a grounding in religious thought, which the survival of papyri, thanks to the favorable climate of Egypt, allows us to trace in the details of its application by practitioners from a range of social levels. Throughout my investigations in these research areas, I have worked extensively with artifacts of manuscript cultures: inscriptions on stone, jewelry, amuletic gems, and metal leaves, books and formularies on papyri and in parchment and paper codices.

Publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5200-8480