Before coming to Durham, he studied for his Ph.D. in Classics at Cambridge, getting lost in libraries, and emerging with a thesis on The Failure of History. After that, he crossed the Atlantic for a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, and turned his Ph.D. into a book, Classical Victorians. In 2016, he was named one of the BBC New Generation Thinkers – one of ten academics selected nationwide. For the BBC, he has recreated a Victorian séance, and gone in search of Alexander the Great’s tomb.