He holds an undergraduate degree from John Carroll University and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. His main interests are in late antiquity, later and medieval Latin, and reception studies. He prepared the second edition of K.P. Harrington's Medieval Latin (1997) and is the author of The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (1998) as well as Poems to Friends (2010), a translation and commentary on the personal poetry of Venantius Fortunatus. He is also the author of a forthcoming companion volume to Augustine's Virgilian Retreat entitled Recuperating Virgil: Reading the Auctores in Augustine's “Confessions”, and is currently working on a translation, with commentary, of Alcuin's poems and letters.