I am a scholar of archaic and classical Greek literature, with interests that extend into Latin poetry. I studied at the University of Lausanne (BA, MA) and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, before completing my DPhil at Oxford. I have held a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship at the University of Sydney and a Humboldt Fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin. My research brings together close philological reading and contextual approaches, focusing on two areas in particular: the reception of myth and the reconstruction of ancient dance theory within Greek cultural and intellectual history. I’m also a professionally trained dancer.

I currently teach most Greek and Latin literature papers.

The Classics course at Oxford is unique for its extraordinary breadth and depth. Students can study literature, history, philosophy, archaeology, and linguistics, moving from the close reading of a single verse of Homer to broader questions about culture and society. This combination of linguistic training and intellectual range equips students not only with detailed expertise in the ancient world, but also with a set of critical skills that they carry into every field they pursue afterwards.

My research develops along two strands:

Myth and reception. My first book, Telamonian Ajax: The Myth in Archaic and Classical Greece (OUP, 2022), traces the evolution of Ajax’s figure between the late eighth and the fourth centuries BCE across literature and visual culture, showing how historical, political, and religious contexts shaped his reception. In addition to Homer, Pindar, Bacchylides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, I have explored further aspects of the reception of his myth in my paper “Pre-Homeric Ajax” and “the Hoplôn Crisis and Ovidian Aesthetics”.

Ancient dance theory. I reconstruct how the Greeks understood dance as a medium of expression by analysing its technical vocabulary across poetry, prose, and performance. Preliminary studies such as “Dance in Antiquity: An Outline of a General Theory” (Gaia) and “Narrative Dance: imitating ēthos and pathos through schêmata” establish the groundwork for a monograph that will set out an ancient theory of dance and its implications for drama, rhetoric, and philosophy.

https://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/events/2023/05/performance-in-antiquity