biography

I was born in Durham, North Carolina. I came to the University of Oxford for my undergraduate degree in Ancient & Modern History, and I have been at Oxford ever since. I now teach Roman history and, occasionally, classical reception.

For me, being a historian means believing as an article of faith that it matters to do justice to the past. I feel that justice is owed to those who have lived and are gone. Sometimes I am unsure whether I can defend this notion that we owe such a debt to those who, after all, will never know if it has been paid. But I still believe, nonetheless, that caring about justice for the past is the basis of a historian’s integrity.

I love reading memoir, and as a biographer of E. E. Cummings, I have tried to bring some of the intimacy of memoir into my writing. Cummings is a unique subject because his archival papers are so extensive—around 120 linear feet of paper in the Houghton Library (Harvard) alone, plus a smaller collection at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. Cummings’s notes are full of emotion and of his own thoughts about his psychology, and this access to his internal world allows for a precision about his state of mind that biographers are rarely privileged to find in their biographical subjects.

When not writing or teaching, I am essentially a country mouse—a lover of the quiet life and a mad keen gardener. I’m obsessed with different varieties of broad bean, garlic, and potato, and I would grow half an acre of radicchio if I could. I have planted acres of garden in my imagination.