ACADEMIC

Academic Career
 
I have a B.A. in Classical Studies from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in Roman History from Columbia University. I read Latin and Greek, as well as French, German, and Italian. The area of my doctoral research was the ancient Roman army, focusing on Roman military society and Roman law: soldiers were not permitted legal marriages with women during service, and their children were illegitimate. My dissertation employed literary and documentary sources, including Latin inscriptions and Greek and Latin papyrus documents. It was since published as The Marriage of Roman Soldiers (13 B.C. - A.D. 235): Law and Family in the Imperial Army.

My second book, Roman Military Service: Ideologies of Discipline in the Late Republic and Early Principate, places Roman literary depictions of the army in social and ideological context.

​I have also edited the Roman half of an encyclopedia, Conflict in Ancient Greece and Rome: The Definitive Political, Social, and Military Encyclopedia.

My fourth work, Daily Life of Women in Ancient Rome (ABC-CLIO/Greenwood, 2022) will be published in March 2022. It is a social history of Roman women, examining their legal and social status and life experiences from birth to death and commemoration. Daily Life of Women examines women of different status levels, reflecting the steep hierarchy of ancient Roman society, from empresses and aristocrats to enslaved women. Daily Life of Women emphasizes primary source documents that were created by and for women, including inscriptions, papyri, and legal writings.  These documents provide invaluable evidence for the behavior of actual women, who played a much larger part in Roman public life and economic activity than has been traditionally acknowledged. 

The photograph at left is my own from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2019 exhibition on classical Palmyra, a city on the edge of the Roman Empire where many cultures merged.