He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University. His current research focuses on the ways power and authority were conceptualized and represented in pre-modern philosophical discourse, with a particular emphasis on moral and political works written from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. He has written on topics ranging from Byzantine historiography to seventeenth-century satire. Among other things, he has edited a collective volume on conceptions of tyranny from Antiquity to the Renaissance that is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.