My first degree was a BA in Classics from Trinity College Dublin (1995-9). I then went astray for five years – studying international politics and economics at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service (1999-2001) and working as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co (2001-4) – before eventually seeing the error of my ways. I returned to Classics and completed an MPhil and PhD at Cambridge (2004-8). I was a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (2008-10) and came to St Andrews in September 2010. I am currently the Editor of the Journal of Roman Studies.

• My Honours modules include Ancient Empires, The Culture of Roman Imperialism, Roman Slavery and Death in Roman Culture. I also contribute to Honours Latin modules on Latin Letters and Latin Historical Writing. 
• I also teach across the team-taught sub-Honours programmes in Ancient History and Latin Literature.

My main focus is a new study of the scale of manumission in the Roman world, drawing on quantitative and comparative methods. The work was funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2019-21). A preliminary study is forthcoming in Chiron 2022, showing that we need a new way to interpret data on the prevalence of Greek names, which represent some of the most important evidence for manumission in Roman Italy,

I continue to work on Quantifying Enfranchisement, a project to quantify the spread of Roman citizenship from Augustus to Caracalla. The project centres on a novel, probabilistic approach to uncertainty in historical estimation. The initial phase was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2014-15). I have published the methodology and the preliminary results in an article in P&P 2016, a more detailed study of the army in JRS 2019 and a case study of the province of Asia in Chiron 2020. I have also collaborated with Clifford Ando on a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project (2016-18) to investigate the significance of Roman citizenship in the century before Caracalla’s universal of citizenship in 212 CE; the project has produced an edited volume just out from Oxford University Press.

Another ongoing project, Probabilistic approaches to uncertainty in pre-modern history (funded by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship, 2017-2019), has led to an edited volume showcasing the wide range of application of probabilistic approaches in ancient history. Co-edited with Daniel Jew and Bart Danon, The Uncertain Past: Probability in Ancient History is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, hopefully later this year.

I am also working on edited volumes on the Roman discourse of unrest, with Lisa Eberle, and on the history of the term Romanus, with Olivia Elder.

 Research interests

• Political, social and cultural history of the Roman empire
• Roman citizenship
• Slavery and manumission
• Ideology and language of empire
• Quantitative methods in ancient history
• Comparative history of ancient empires

Research students

I would be very happy to supervise research projects in any of these areas. I have supervised PhD dissertations on:

• Roman law in Tacitus
• The imperial salutatio
• Modelling the distribution of wealth in the Roman empire
• The significance of civitates in the Roman West
• Images of foreign peoples and place in Roman art
• Writing the lives of Roman emperors
• Roman land division
• Actor Network Theory approaches to Early Roman Iberia
• The Triumviral aristocracy

Political, social and cultural history of the Roman empire; imperialism; slavery; citizenship; quantitative methods