A native of Los Angeles California, I attended UC San Diego, receiving a BS in Physics (1986) and a BA in Classical Studies (1987). I received the PhD in Classics from Brown University in 1997.

I am a Kress/Brown Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (1993-1994 and 1995-1996), a Broneer Fellow of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1994-1995), and a Junior Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies (2000-2001).

I served as Vice President and President of the Classical Society of the American Academy in Rome (1999-2002), an organization which grants scholarships to graduate students and high school Latin teachers for study in the Academy's Classical Summer School. I was the Assistant Director of the Classical Summer School in 1996 and 1997, and I have been appointed Director of the Classical Summer School for the summers of 2008-2010. I am currently Creighton's representative on the Advisory Council of the American Academy, and was a council member of the American Academy's Society of Fellows.

I was an assistant professor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome in 1998-1999, mediated Creighton's application to the consortium of schools that make up the ICCS, serve as Creighton's Faculty Representative to the ICCS, and worked there as an associate professor in 2006-2007. I have been named the Professor in Charge of the new ICCS Sicily for the year 2010-2011; my wife Christina Clark will be the Associate Professor there in that same year.

I have been Creighton's Faculty Representative of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, the Chair of Creighton's College of Arts and Sciences' Joslyn Museum Committee, co-organizer of the CU at Joslyn lecture series at the museum, and am a Faculty Associate of the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society.

My research interests center on Roman civilization and especially the city of Rome. I have written articles on the Annales Maximi, the prosecution and exile of M. Aemilius Scaurus (pr. 56), the composition of Appian’s Roman History, and an article on a mysterious Roman sarcophagus bearing an inscription (IGUR 1700) suggesting that it could have been the historian Appian’s.

With two students in my Greek New Testament class as co-authors, I wrote an article on Mel Gibson's The Passion in 2004. A recent article of mine appeared in the Canadian journal Phoenix. It concerns fictitious elements of Appian's narrative of the Battle of Pharsalus. Most recently, a chapter on Appian's Civil Wars for the Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography has appeared, and I am at work on 11 author-entries for the Brill's New Jacoby project, of which 8 have been published. I have been asked to write an entry on Appian for the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History, and I am at work on two books. One is pedagogical, and seeks to teach Greek through translation of Greek verse inscriptions in Rome; the other is scholarly, an edition and commentary on Caesar's Civil War, with co-authors Kurt A. Raaflaub and Cynthia Damon.

I am at work on an exciting new project together with Dr. John Wilson of the Joslyn Art Museum and CANES Classical Languages Major Meghan Freeman. We are conserving and publishing a Roman marble portrait of Augustus which has languished in the Joslyn's vaults for decades.

I have spent a large part of the last three years developing (with a great deal of help) a revised classical languages curriculum for our department. As a part of this process, I attended a conference on classics in Jesuit Education at Xavier University in early November 2005, delivering the paper "Classical Language Reform at Creighton University." The paper will appear in the Xavier Conference's volume of proceedings.

Before coming to Creighton I taught at the American Academy in Rome, UC San Diego, Gustavus Adolphus College, the ICCS Rome, and at the Johns Hopkins, Catholic, and Georgetown Universities.

My extracurricular interests include architecture, astronomy, film scores, Macintosh computers, philately, pop culture, and travel, as well as being a regular contributor to the everything2 online encyclopedia. I continue to muddle along as the father of a rambunctious, nearly 6-year-old daughter Genevieve, but I think she's winning. Here's a recent picture of us. If you're interested, you can see more pictures at my Facebook account.