THE DEPARTMENT of CLASSICS

Research Interests

My research is centered on the historical development of the Greek language. Why does a Greek author use one syntactic construction rather than another similar one? How do the reasons for the choice of construction change over time? To what extent do the genre of the text and contact with other languages play a role in such variation?

At the moment, my main project is a book on expressions of time in Greek, primarily in Classical prose and Koine. A couple of the questions I seek to answer are: Can we describe the relationship between the genitive and dative of time more accurately than the nebulous rules given in the standard grammars? How does choice of temporal construction interact with verbal tense and aspect?

Selected Publications

• Expressions of Agency in Ancient Greek (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
• Greek and Latin from an Indo-European Perspective, co-edited with M. McCullagh, B. Nielsen, A. Ruppel, O. Tribulato (Cambridge Classical Journal suppl. vol. 32, 2007)
• "The temporal characteristics of the historical present in Thucydides," in The Historical Present in Thucydides: Semantics and Narrative Function, ed. J. Lallot, A. Rijksbaron, B. Jacquinod, and M. Buijs (Brill, 2011)
• "Jewish and Christian Greek," in Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, ed. E. J. Bakker (Blackwell, 2010)
• "Greek particles: Just a literary phenomenon?" in Discourse Cohesion in Ancient Greek, ed. Gerry Wakker and Stéphanie Bakker (Brill, 2009)
• "The spatial use of ana and kata with the accusative in Homer," Glotta 82: 70-95 (2006)
• review of Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2 vols., ed. R. Beekes (New England Classical Journal 38(1): 49-52 (2011))
• review of Greek Prepositions: From Antiquity to the Present, P. Bortone (Linguist List 22.728)
• review of The Language of Literature: Linguistic Approaches to Classical Texts, ed. R. J. Allan and M. Buijs (Mnemosyne 63: 492-7 (2010))
• review of The Non-Literary Latin Letters: A Study of Their Syntax and Pragmatics, H. Halla-aho (The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 47: 323-7 (2010))
• review of Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue, H. Dik (Gnomon 81: 481-4 (2009))

• review of The Moods of Homeric Greek, J. Willmott (Classical Journal on-line 2009.04.01)
• review of The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek: An Introduction, 3rd edn, A. Rijksbaron (BMCR 2008.02.24)
• review of Suppletion und Defektivität im griechischen Verbum, D. Kölligan (BMCR 2007.08.20)

Personal

I was an undergraduate at Rice University (B.A. 1997 in Classics and German). I then went to graduate school in England at the University of Cambridge (M.Phil. 1998, Ph.D. 2002). I then taught at Rice for two years, before returning to Trinity College, Cambridge, for a four-year research fellowship. I joined the department here in Charlottesville in 2007.