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I'd like to be able to say that I've been interested in the Greeks (or even the Romans) for as long as I can remember, but I wasn't. I wasn't one of those kids who loved Greek myths, truth be told. My earliest memory of things classical comes relatively late, in high school, when I fell for the Greek tragedies, especially Aeschylus' Oresteia, which we read in English class in my suburban public high school in upstate New York. I also took Latin, but only because it looked more interesting than typing class was.

In part because of my interest in the Greeks, I ended up at a peculiar liberal arts college in Annapolis Maryland, called St. John's College (absolutely no connection to the Naval Academy, save for the annual croquet game, at which we regularly pummel the hapless Middies). While there I read much classical literature in translation and studied Greek for a couple of years, as did all of my classmates (I told you it was peculiar). I also was deeply imbued, or perhaps indoctrinated, with a teaching philosophy I attempt to apply whenever possible (though it's tough outside the rather refined confines of St. John's). All classes at St. John's are discussion classes, and students talk to each other, not only to their professors: when this works it is, I'm convinced, the best way to learn. For my senior thesis I wrote on Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, because I found it entirely mysterious. It still is. I was graduated in 1988.

During the summers of my junior and senior years I brushed up on my Latin (which is not offered at St. John's) and Greek (which is taught there as much in theory as in practice) at the Latin/Greek Institute in New York City, one fine place to go if you want to absorb immense amounts of Greek or Latin while attempting to abstain from the attractions of the Big Apple. I then went off to grad school, not knowing what else to do with myself, to study in the Department of Classics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

At Chapel Hill I found the classics took, in no doubt in part due to the supportive and pleasant learning environment there. I continued to enjoy learning the languages and reading classical literature, and discovered that I thoroughly enjoyed teaching the stuff. I wrote a master's thesis on the cosmology of the Greek poet Hesiod to receive a MA in Greek. My doctoral dissertation, finished in the summer of 1996, was a commentary on a Socratic dialogue written (very probably) by Plato, the Alcibiades I. The commentary seemed a good way to hone my skills as a Hellenist (one who studies Greek language and literature) while indulging my interest in philosophy. I prefer reading texts closely to making grand generalizations (save in my lecture classes, of course), and the line by line commentary format demands this sort of detailed attention.

My last two years of graduate school were spent most pleasantly at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. I first did a year getting the school's quick course in archaeology by busing and hiking to more ankle-high Greek remains than you can shake a stick at. My second year was mainly spent in the library doing research for my dissertation, though I did hop out for souvlaki now and then. This was the high-point of my classical education (the whole academic experience, of course, not just the ouzo, er, souvlaki). Moral: Do Study Abroad.

After graduate school I took a three year no expenses paid trip around the country bouncing from one one-year job to another, as do so many new Ph.D.'s in the humanities. (Not the high point of my classical career. Moral: . . . I don't want to think about it.) I first did a one-year stint teaching something like Western Civ. in a peculiar and misnamed "Classical Studies Program" at Phoenix College, a community college in that sunny (& smoggy) city. I then taught myth and Latin at Illinois State up in Normal, before landing in Carbondale, where, after one year as a lecturer, I was lucky enough to find myself in a tenure-track position, thanks be to the gods, in the fall of 1999. I have now managed to get tenured and promoted, and so will officially be an Associate Professor in August of 2005.

My primary research interest these days is Socratic literature, particularly Xenophon's Socratic works. For the last 100 years or so Xenophon's works have often been ignored, while Plato's works have been studied ever more intensely. There are some good reasons for this: Plato is a greater literary artist and a greater philospher. But Xenophon has much to teach us as well. I am convinced that Xenophon's works are constructed with much more literary sophistication than is usually assumed, and that the Socrates who emerges from a close study of these works is a figure well worth all the study I can give him.

But I also pride myself on being a generalist (one who studies, and even attempts to write about, far too wide a range of things). I've published on the historian Herodotus and the poet Hesiod as well as on the Socratics Plato and Xenophon. Here the best I can do to define myself is to say that over the years I've been most interested in texts where philosophical issues (broadly defined) are treated in a literary form. Thus I have been interested primarily in historiographical questions in Herodotus (i.e., how Herodotus approaches writing history, not so much the historical facts themselves). And I have studied Hesiod's mindset when it comes to cosmology (his general idea of what the world is like), and how this fits in with the larger issues at stake in his poem about the origin of the gods (the Theogony).

During my sabbatical year (2005-2006) I plan to hone up on my German (I'll be in Berlin) and get to work on a book on Xenophon's Socrates. For more on my research, check out my traditional cv or my research page.