I am a philologist and cultural historian interested primarily in early Greek poetry and philosophy. Much of my recent research has focused on the ideological work of cosmology: the way in which competing accounts of reality serve to ground and contest systems of social and political value.

I am currently at work on my first monograph, tentatively titled Kosmos: The Epic Image of Reality, which challenges the traditional story of when and how the world came to be called a kosmos. The consensus holds that this usage emerged in the 6th century BCE, when one of the early philosophers, breaking with mythic accounts and articulating the novel notion of a natural world, decided to call it an “arrangement.” Against this view, I argue in the book’s first half that the cosmological use of this word goes back to the epic tradition of Homer and Hesiod and its fundamentally political account of reality: the kosmos for these poets is the particular “arrangement” which Zeus, as the patriarch of gods and men, has made of his world-constituting household by distributing places and roles to all its members. Then, in the second half of the book, I argue that kosmos does not thereafter become a neutral term for the world; it is instead one which later poets and philosophers continue to use in close engagement with the world of epic and its host of ideological commitments.