91ÖÆƬ³§

Born and raised along the coast of Lake Michigan in Kenosha, Wisconsin, my route to the ancient Mediterranean began as one might expect: through love of Greek myth and Roman history my freshman year at the . After my introduction to Latin my junior year I was smitten, as learning Latin showed me how to peek behind the curtains to see how language works: it helped me to see all the charming elements and beauty in English, while pushing me as a translator to learn and interpret creatively. I graduated with a Bachelors of Science in  after studying for a summer in Rome under . I spent three years in the role of quality assurance at Epic Systems in Madison after graduation, and returned the graduate school at Wisconsin, receiving an M.A. for my work on the tradition of immorality among Roman historians, and then a Ph.D. after writing a dissertation on Plutarch's use of Homeric models in his Parallel Lives.

Since then, I've given myriad papers and published several articles on Plutarch's works, from literary and narratological examinations to, more recently, Plutarch's understanding of moral cognition and his methods of trying to teach moral philosophy to his readers. My latest research on Plutarch has been multi-disciplinary in nature, as I've been researching the cognitive sciences and looking at how that field can be used to evaluate and perhaps build on the efforts Plutarch makes in effecting moral learning in his audience. Plutarch, who served as a Delphic priest, truly embraced the Delphic dictates of "μηδὲν ἄγαν" ("Nothing in excess") and "γνῶθε σεαυτόν" (Know thyself), combining the lofty hopes of improving the lives of his friends and family and neighbors with a sense of duty and accountability to his community members. His Parallel Lives are an amazingly rich and fascinating culmination of his eclectic and humane philosophy. Collectively, Plutarch's series of treatises ask hard questions about the relationships between virtue and leadership and greatness than "biography" does, and it is a foundational work for my class on Morality and Leadership (Classics 3306).

I am a vociferous advocate of games in the classroom, and have created role-immersion games on topics like The Court of Nero, the Trojan War, and the Roman Senate of the post-Hannibalic War Republic. My colleague Rob Sobak has used The Court of Nero in his course on Tacitus (Classics 2757). 91ÖÆƬ³§ of my Classical Myth course (Classics 1101) participate in my Trojan War game and students in my course on the Roman Republic (Classics 2214) run the Roman Senate for a month.

Classics is the state of the art liberal arts degree. In studying the Classics you get to study philosophy, government, law, history, archaeology, literature, and two(!) languages, Latin and ancient Greek. The Classics live on famously in Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, the works of Madeline Miller, Nina MacLaughlin, and Pat Barker, as well as in video games like Hades and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, films like Peterson's Troy and Nolan's The Odyssey. Classicists continue to push the boundaries of what the Classics are, and its multi-disciplinary nature makes it apt for combining research into areas like gender studies, examinations of race and indigeneity, environmental studies, religion, and as my own research is showing, psychology.