Overview
My primary research interest is the relationship between politics, literary form, and philosophy in Graeco-Roman antiquity. My first book project, provisionally titled A Grammar of Democracy: Antilogy, Politics, and Literature in Classical Greece, explores how a single form, antilogy (the polarized delivery of opposed speeches in front of an audience), travels across a multitude of cultural fields in classical Greece, creating a shared conceptual language and argumentative grammar that tie together democracy, literature, and philosophy. Against this background, I argue, the form of Socratic dialogue emerges as a political and literary response to the fluid polarization fostered by antilogy in the democratic sphere.
Related ongoing projects include an article on the aesthetics of polarization in Greek literature and political thought and a collaborative commentary to the sophist Hippias of Elis. I hold a PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard, a BA/MA from the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and a M.Mus. in Piano Performance from the Conservatory of Salerno.
Selected Publications
(forthcoming) “Paradoxes of common sense: epideixis, treatises, and antilogy in classical Greece,” American Journal of Philology 146.3, 2025.
“Death, memory, intertextuality: warrior catalogues in Aeschylus’ Persians,” Classical Philology 118(3), 291–316, 2023.
“The shape of early Greek utopia,” Classical Quarterly 71(2), 2021, 467–81.
“Legal theory, sophistic antilogy: Antiphon’s Tetralogies,” in Our beloved Polites. Studies presented to Peter J. Rhodes, edited by Leão, D. et al., Oxford: Archaeopress, 2022, pp. 121–33.