About

I am Professor of Ancient History in the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney and a member of the Sydney Environment Institute. I was a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council (2018–22) and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2018. In 2025, I was also appointed Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

My research focuses on ancient cultural and social history, ancient Greek religion, Herodotus, and historiography, with a particular interest and expertise in the history of ideas. My work has contributed to expanding the study of ancient Greek religion beyond a narrow focus on civic institutions and politics to include questions of belief, personal religion, and the many forms religious life could take both within and beyond the polis. A central theme in my work is storytelling: how stories function to bridge the gap between past and present, how they shape cultural understanding, and how they allow individuals and societies think about the world and the human place within it.

My most recent book, The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures that Make Us Human (Cambridge, 2024), traces the journeys of ten mythological creatures from the ancient world into the present day. Through these figures, it explores what ancient myths can still reveal about what it means to be human. The book comes with a recommendation from Stephen Fry.

My current project turns to a different but equally urgent question: truth. Drawing on the classical past, it examines how truth emerged as a shared intellectual and social value in ancient Greece, and what that history might tell us about contemporary struggles over truth and truthfulness. In 2024, I joined an expert working group on information resilience commissioned by the Office of the Chief Scientist and the National Science and Technology Council.