He completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UCSB in December of 2007, with a dissertation entitled “Epic and the Nation in Virgil’s Aeneid and Joyce’s Ulysses.” He has held lectureships in Classics at Scripps College in Claremont, California and at the University of California, Irvine, as well as the Charles Tesoriero Lectureship in Latin at the University of New England, Australia. He has published articles on Virgil, James Joyce, and Lucan, and his 2009 article, “The Reassurance of Fratricide in the Aeneid,” won the Gildersleeve Prize for the best article of the year in the American Journal of Philology.