Education & Professional History
B.A., Oberlin College (1986), Ph.D., Brown University (1991).
Taught at Carleton: 2006, 2008-2010, 2013-2016, 2020-2022
Other Higher Education Teaching Positions: Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics, Gustavus Adolphus College (1991-1992); Adjunct Faculty Member, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, University of St. Thomas (Fall 2005); Co-Director, Dickinson College Summer Latin Workshop (2016)
At Carleton since 2022.
Highlights & Recent Activity
My most recent project is an online commentary on Homer Odyssey 9-12 for Dickinson College Commentaries, a collaboration with Thomas Van Nortwick (Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics Emeritus, Oberlin College) and Christopher Francese (Asbury Clarke Professor of Classics, Dickinson College). As part of this project I worked with four Student Research Partners, funded by the Humanities Center, in December 2021. I’m currently working on a commentary on Odyssey 5-8 with the same collaborators at Dickinson and Oberlin. I’m also working with Austin Mason and Alex Knodell to create an annotated digital 3D model of a Homeric ship to accompany the commentaries.
Organizations & Scholarly Affiliations
ASCAP
Books
Homer, Odyssey, Books 9-12. Text and Commentary. With Thomas Van Nortwick (Oberlin College). Dickinson College Commentaries. Online.
Domestication: Collected Poems, 1996-2016. Up On Big Rock Poetry Series/Shipwreckt Books, 2017. Nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. One of Content Bookstore’s ten bestselling books of 2017. Print.
Aeschylus, Oresteia: An Adaptation. Hero Now Theatre, 2017. Print.
Selections from Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. Text and Commentary. With Austin Mason (Carleton College). Dickinson College Commentaries. 2017. Online.
Chapbooks
Shelter in Place. Finishing Line Press 2022.
The Collecting Jar. Grayson Books 2005. Winner of the 2005 Grayson Books Chapbook Competition.
Scholarly Publications
“Encounters in the Fairy Hill,” The Bottle Imp 19 (Spring 2016). Online. Invited essay for a special issue on Naomi Mitchison for the online journal of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
“Bee Line: How the Honey Bee Defined the American Frontier,” Readings (17 March 2016). Online.
“Real and Not Real: Naomi Mitchison’s Philosophy of the Historical Novel,” Readings Journal (June 15, 2015). Online. Also included in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Volume 327. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau (Gale Cengage/Layman Poupard Publishing 2016).
“Ancients and Moderns and the Public Use of Learning,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries 5.1 (Fall 2013). Online. Invited essay for a special issue on Public Scholarship in the Eighteenth Century.
“James Bowdoin: Philosopher and Politician,” New England Quarterly 84.4 (December 2011). Print.
“‘A Mirror of the Times’: The Catilinarian Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century British and American Political Thought,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 14.3/4 (2007/2008). Print.
“Response from Rob Hardy,” Classical Journal (October 2006). Print.
“Girls Reading Vergil: Stories of Latin and Progressive Education,” New England Classical Journal 33.2 (May 2006). Print.
“Missing the Heart-Shaped Piece: How I Failed as a Middle School Latin Teacher,” Classical Journal 100.4 (April-May 2005). Print. Cited as a Notable Essay of 2005 in Best American Essays 2005.
“The Male Readers of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” The Lion and the Unicorn 28.1 (January 2004). Print.
“Housekeeping Hereafter: The Preservation of Domesticity in a Technological Utopia,” Utopian Studies 13.2 (2003). Print.
“Gilbert White and the Natural History of Vergilian Echoes,” Classical World 95.2 (2002). Print.
“Susan Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Beecher and the Theology of Homemaking,” in Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson, ed., Susan Fenimore Cooper: New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Print.
“Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish,” The Explicator 58.1 (Fall 1999). Print.
The Uses of Memory in the Poetry of Vergil. Dissertation. Brown University. 1991.
“Vergil’s Epitaph for Pastoral: Remembering and Forgetting in Eclogue 9,” Syllecta Classica 2 (1990). Print.
“A Study of Erasmus’s Editions of the Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca.” Electronic Thesis or Dissertation. Oberlin College, 1986. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. 23 Jul 2013. Online.
Literary Essays & Freelance Writing
“Caesar Vs. Pirates,” Truly*Adventurous. Online.
“Things,” Critical Read (August 2020). Online.
“The Unselfish Heroine,” Persephone Biannually 25 (Spring/Summer 2019). Print. Invited essay for the biannual newsletter from Persephone Books, London.
“The Long Sunset: R.C. Sherriff and the Excavation of Angmering Roman Villa,” Arion 24.2 (Fall 2018). Print.
“An Open House: Susan Glaspell and the roots of American political drama,” Critical Read (August 2018). Online.
“The Seam,” North Dakota Quarterly (Summer/Fall 2017.) Print.
“Metaphor Lesson,” RiverTeeth (“Beautiful Things”). Online.
“Telephone,” The Common Online (June 7, 2017). Online.
“Love Behind Locked Doors: Phyllis Bottome in the Age of Trump,” Critical Flame (January 2017). Online.
“‘We Live Close Together and We Live Far Apart’: A Look2 Essay on Susan Glaspell,” Ploughshares 42.4 (2017). Print and Online.
“’Deceit only was forbidden: A Brief Literary Biography of Richard Henry Wilde,” New England Review 37.2 (2016). Also included in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Volume 381. Ed. Rebecca Parks (Gale Cengage/Layman Poupard Publishing 2020). Print.
“Naomi Mitchison, Peaceable Transgressor,” New England Review 36.1 (2015). Also included in Twentieth -Century Literary Criticism. Volume 327. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau (Gale Cengage/Layman Poupard Publishing 2016). Print.
“Out of Body: Reading Gender Through ‘Women’s Fiction,’” Critical Flame (March/April 2014). Online. Critical Flame’s most-read essay of 2014.
“The Passion of Rose Elizabeth Cleveland,” New England Review 28.1 (2007). Print.
“Theodore Roosevelt and the Masculine/Feminine Complex,” New England Review 26.4 (2005). Print.
“Sinclair Lewis’s Work of Art,” New England Review 25.3 (2004). Print.
“Yogurt Couvade,” Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers (Summer 2004). Print.
“Sub Story,” North Dakota Quarterly 69.4 (Fall 2002). Print.
“Wild About Baseball: A Naturalist Plays Catch with His Son,” New Letters 68.3/4 (2002). Print.
“Patience: Fossil Hunting with Professor Schmidt,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 8.1 (Winter 2001). Print.
“Twenty-Two Thousand Days,” Sonora Review 36 (Spring 1999). Print.
“Oak Savanna Remembered,” The Prairie Reader (Fall 1998). Print.
“Daddy’s Bread,” North Dakota Quarterly 65.1 (Winter 1998). Print.
“Slowly,” Brevity (Fall 1998). Online.
Translations
“Letter from Leoba (Leobgyth) to St. Boniface (ca. 732).” Translated from Latin. Metamorphoses (Fall 2020). Print.
Translations of primary sources from ancient Greek, in Clara Shaw Hardy. Athens 415: A City in Crisis. With translations by Robert B. Hardy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Print.
Book Reviews
“The Previous Everyday: Nicola’s Griffith’s Hild.” Critical Flame (September/October 2014). Online.
The Last Boy. By Robert H. Lieberman. ISLE 11.1 (Winter 2004). Print.
Encyclopedia Entries
“Cincinnatus,” “Cato,” “Ancestry.” George Washington Digital Encyclopedia, ed. Adam Schprintzen. Mount Vernon. Online.
“Boston Latin School” and “New England Primer” in Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., ed., Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2008. Print.