About
I’ll be honest up front. This website is completely narcissistic. I know that. Nevertheless, having resisted this sort of thing a long time, I now find it not only helpful but necessary to have some kind of web presence. I think it’s because of my students. At least, I’d like to blame it on them. Students are pushing the faculties of universities to be more web savvy, no question about it. And now pretty much all of my academic work, teaching and research alike, revolves around the web and internet communication. If I’m not emailing texts, I’m downloading them, scanning them, or digitally searching obscure Greek words that appear in them. Even Classics, such a stick-in-the-mud discipline in many ways, is digitizing itself: sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse (perhaps). So there’s my apology. For those visiting this page such an apology is no doubt unnecessary, but it makes me feel better to have said it. The academy communicates via the internet. I think that’s an important and salutary development. Not that things aren’t lost in the process, but hopefully they aren’t lost permanently, and other things are possible that weren’t before.
I teach Classics, mainly Greek, at Washington and Lee University, nestled in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley (map). Our departmental website is here. Born and raised in Atlanta, I went to undergrad at Vanderbilt, graduating with a major in Classical Languages in 1999, and went on to do my graduate work at Oxford, also in Classics. After finishing my D.Phil. there, my family and I moved to Cambridge, Mass. where I worked at the Harvard Society of Fellows for three years (2004-2007) and the Department of the Classics for one (2006-2007). That’s when we came to Virginia.
My research mainly concerns Greek literature in late antiquity. I hope to explain what this means in layman’s terms in a future iteration of this page. For the moment, I can only point you to my Curriculum Vitae (aka Resumé). If you have specific questions, feel free to email me.
For the readers who want to know what is going on behind the scenes, please see the Colophon.
I hope to continue to update and expand this page, as well as the CV and the Colophon pages, in the future. If you have suggestions definitely let me know.
SFJ