I am a classicist who specializes in Augustan literature and its reception in the Renaissance. I am originally from Michigan, although my studies have taken me across the globe and across countless archives. My interests lie primarily with the poet Ovid and the poetry that he wrote while in exile, in particular, the insights that it can offer about changes in Roman society. As an instructor, my goal is to make the classical world accessible and interesting - to share the languages and culture of Greece and Rome with new students. I currently teach two courses at UVA. In the first, we explore how monuments, from antiquity to the modern era, serve as repositories of memory and of values. In the second, we examine core issues of epistemology, that is, how we attempt to reconstruct the ancient world based on fragmentary evidence.