BA (Oxford); MPhil PhD (Cambridge)
My main research interests are in Greek and Near Eastern cultural and intellectual history, with a particular focus on the Hellenistic period. My first monograph, Between Greece and Babylonia: Hellenistic Intellectual History in Cross-Cultural Perspective (CUP, 2019) examines connections between Greek and Babylonian scholarship in the Hellenistic period and argues for a new, cross-cultural approach to the writing of Hellenistic intellectual history. I am particularly interested in historiographical and chronographic texts from the later first millennium BC, and the ways in which scholars from different cultural and intellectual traditions engaged with contemporary imperialism.
A second strand of research involves ancient celestial scholarship and its contexts. Together with Johannes Haubold and John Steele, I co-edited the first volume of collected essays on the Astronomical Diaries from Babylon, a collection of almost 1000 clay tablets which, over a period of some five hundred years (6th century to 1st century BCE), record observations of astronomical phenomena and events on earth (Keeping Watch in Babylon: The Astronomical Diaries in Context, Brill, 2019). I am currently editing Babylonian Chronographic Texts of the Hellenistic Period, by Bert van der Spek, Irving Finkel, and Reinhard Pirngruber, which includes new editions of and commentaries on the historical sections of the Astronomical Diaries and the Late Babylonian Chronicles.