For a complete list of my publications, please see my CV. This page discusses my monograph and current research program.

In January 2016, my book Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E. was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, Divinations Series. You can link to the UPenn Press site here: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15511.html

Reviews include:

Aaron Johnson for Choice Connect 53.10 (June 2016); Heidi Wendt for Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2016.10.27; Dylan Burns for Journal of Early Christian Studies 25.3 (Fall 2017): 216; Jeremiah Coogan for Reading Religion: A publication of the American Academy of Religion (October 23, 2017); Marco Zambon for Studia Graeco-Arabica 7 (2017): 360-74; David B. Levy for Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12.2 (2017): 216.

In autumn of 2017, I successfully applied for a University of Manitoba Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada fellowship to start a new project on plant ontology in the ancient world based on pharmacological, botanical, and alchemical texts. My aim is to trace common ideas about plant being across different kinds of texts and explore how thinking about plants intersected with thinking about other kinds of being in antiquity.

I have just completed editing the proofs for a book under contract with Oxford University Press’ Women in Antiquity series (forthcoming April 2021).  It is a biography of the elusive and intriguing fourth-century philosopher and theurgist, Sosipatra of Pergamum.  All we know about her is contained in a brief description of her life and teaching career in Eunapius’ Lives of the Sophists.  In the book, I contextualize what details we have of her life, including the more fantastic elements of her story, at the same time as I pay attention to the way in which Eunapius uses her gender for his own rhetorical purposes.

Kristi Upson-Saia (Occidental College), Jared Secord (University of Calgary), and I are finishing a very large project under contract with the University of California Press (submission March 2021). It is a source book for ancient Greek and Roman medicine (5o0 BCE to 5oo CE).

I am also working on a co-edited volume for Cambridge University Press with Elizabeth DePalma Digeser (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Ilaria Ramelli (Durham University) on late ancient biography.