I was born in northern Germany but grew up in the area between Cologne and Bonn, Germany's former capital. I went on to study Ancient Greek, Latin and Byzantine Greek at Bonn, Frankfurt, and Pisa. After graduating from Bonn University I also did my Ph.D. there on Language, History and Identity in the works of the Greek literary critic and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st cent. BCE). After a post-doc in the U.S. (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), I joined the School of Classics at St Andrews in 2011, where I am now a Senior Lecturer. Romans writing under and about Roman rule have continued to fascinate me, and I have never stopped working on Dionysius, Polybius and other Greek writers, mostly historians, of the Hellenistic and early imperial period (roughly the 3rd through 1st centuries BCE). I admit, thought, that Classical Hebrew is becoming an ever more important part of my life. My current book project is an intellectual and cultural history of the debate about Hannibal's march, one of the most famous legacies of the Hellenistic period, from Polybius to the 21st century. Approaches that have been most influential on my work include the New Historicism, intellectual history, cognitive approaches to narrative and, most recently, ecocriticsm. In my free time, I like to roam through the Scottish hills and countryside or listen to classical music, preferably on vinyl.
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