"I’m a social historian, working particularly in the late and post-Roman world (third through seventh centuries CE). I’ve spent a fair bit of time studying rural communities in late antiquity: how they worked, what strategies, institutions and structures they possessed for maintaining equilibrium and managing conflict, and what they did when things went wrong. This has led me to consider the social dynamics of disasters in the period: what factors made particular communities vulnerable or resilient in the face of potentially catastrophic natural hazards, military incursions, famines, or disease, and how those communities might have experienced, responded to, and recovered from such events. These questions are part of a broader exploration of the complex, dialectical relations between human populations and the environments in which they live, which places the project of social history in conversation with environmental studies and landscape archaeology.

During the 2019-20 academic year, having received a fellowship from the ACLS, I was on leave to write a monograph on the experience of risk and uncertainty in the late Roman world."

• Roman social, economic, agrarian, and legal history, particularly in the late antique period
• Non-elite and marginal populations, especially in rural contexts
• Disasters, their causes, impacts, implications, and aftermaths
• Interactions between human populations and their physical environments
• Legacies of ancient Rome in American cultural, political, and intellectual discourses