Personal Statement

An interest that has run throughout my career is the question of how people come to hold the religious beliefs that they do.  What makes us believe in God, or gods, or demons, or angels, or saints, or ghosts, or ifrits, or banshees or anything else?  In recent years, I've focused particularly on how narratives create and sustain such beliefs and how they help to underwrite the rituals that accompany belief.  My most recent scholarly book is The Story of Myth (2018), which uses approaches from folklore studies, narratology, media studies and the social sciences to better understand the ways in which myths, in the vivid forms in which they were narrated in ancient Greece, contributed to the creation and sustenance of belief in the ancient gods and heroes.   More recently, I've been working on a book about the goddess Hecate, which will trace her development from her first appearance in Hesiod's Theogony through to her roles in late antique mysticism, with a focus on the unusually strong association between individual worshippers and Hecate

I've also published a public-facing book,, Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Readers (Princeton 2023) that puts to use what I learned by writing The Story of Myth.  Here, I retell Greek myths such a way meant to engage modern audiences while nonetheless remaining true to ancient versions.  Check my personal website for virtual events connected with Gods and Mortals.  I'm now finishing a second public-facing book called Arachne's Threads: Why Myths Mattered to the Greeks and Still Matter Now.

I am currently accepting new doctoral students.

Books

Edited Volumes

Recent Articles

•2024 TEDx talk: Why Supernatural Horror Fiction Might Make you Think about God

•"The Religious Affordance of Supernatural Horror Fiction,"  Numen 70 (2023) 113-137.

•"Here Lies Hecate: Poetry and Immortality in 2nd-Century Mesembria," Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 24 (2022) 305-18.

•"Ancient Greek Tales of the Afterlife," in David Saunders, ed., Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife in Ancient Greek Vase Painting (Getty Museum: 2021).

•"Theurgy," in Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, ed. David T. Frankfurter (Brill 2019).

•“Many (Un)Happy Returns: Ancient Greek Concepts of a Return from Death and their Later Counterparts," in Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition, eds. Gunnel Ekroth and Ingela Nilsson (Brill 2018) 356-69.