About me
EDUCATOR…
I have degrees in Classics from UC Santa Barbara (BA, 2010), University of Oxford (MSt, 2012), and University College London (PhD, 2016) and have been teaching in higher education for 10 years, having begun as a graduate student at University College London. I have taught in classics departments at universities in the US and UK, in subjects ranging from Greek and Latin language to themed courses in Roman Imperial history, ancient Greek and Roman ideas of slavery and freedom, Pompeiian archaeology, classics and literary theory, ancient concepts of humor, and hero narratives. I currently teach courses in Greco-Roman myth, ritual studies, research strategies, and memoir and autobiography to graduate students in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California.
My teaching philosophy is essentially summed up in the phrase “what the student does”, as in the 1999 article by John Biggs, entitled “What the Student Does: Teaching for Enhanced Learning”, which has influenced me greatly alongside the work of other teachers I have learned from in person or through their writing: Jeff Souther, Evans Lansing Smith, Christine Downing, Patrick Mahaffey, Dennis Slattery, Maria Wyke, Gesine Manuwald, Kurikindi, Malidoma, Patsy Kambitsch, bell hooks, Gabrielle Roth, Marilyn Power Scott, Art Cisneros, Erika Gagnon, Claudia Cuentas, Jennifer Freed, David Whyte, Ann Lewin-Benham, and many others!
I consider myself a facilitator and a witness to my students’ process of uncovering the insights of precious importance to them, and as an educator it is my job to learn how I can better support their process. I am included as a student in this adventure, meaning that it is part of my accountability to my students to remain a student, always curious about learning, including learning how to teach.
Teaching modalities I like to use include: objects/artifacts; ritual; simulations/performances/scene work; oral history; intuitive movement.
Teaching is my life’s highest calling.
AUTHOR…
I am the author of articles in classical studies, theatre studies, and film studies, and completed my doctoral dissertation in 2016 on dynamics of emotion in popular cultural representations of ancient Greece and Rome in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My case study was the 1880 historical novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and its theatre and silent film adaptations. From novelist Lew Wallace’s personal letters to readers to screenwriters’ memos to fan editorials in silent movie magazines, I worked to trace the link audiences of these works made (and were invited to make) with the emotional world of “ancient Rome” through the presentation of it as a distant and simultaneously immediate place for the modern mythic imagination.
My current research explores the ways in which (often vilified) female characters tell their own stories in the Greek tragic plays they inhabit, and how these memoirs motivate their actions in situations of the greatest moral challenge.
I am also a poet-storyteller and have performed stories and poems at the Catweazle Club in Oxford, UK, London’s Being Human Festival, Backbone Storytelling in Santa Barbara, California, and other venues. My poems and short fiction have been published in The Dawntreader, Burn Before Reading, and Espacio Fronterizo • Espace Frontière • Borderland, a trilingual journal on the subject of borders, frontiers, and liminal spaces, geographical, physical, and psychological, of which I am also senior editor of the English section.
STORYWORKER…
I like you am a keeper of stories, personal and ancestral, and have no choice but to “work them through” my body, mind, language, interpretative frameworks, and relationships. Whether your work with stories is through visual art, dreamwork, theater, writing, teaching, reading, dialogue, dance, building, traveling, meditating, it is an intentional activity, and I think one of the greatest virtues of one’s life is to find a way to tell your story, to place your life into a narrative sequence.
This can involve irony, sadness, joy, deliverance, regret, apology, forgiveness, humor, and so many other connotations, which can change daily. Recording your voice through whatever medium, marking the great moments of change in your life, and using stories you know from folktale, myth, or family hand-me-down lore is a great way to do this.
I have been influenced in this work by my time as an academic, a yoga teacher, a long-term 5Rhythms dance practitioner, and a student of immersive theatre and most recently improvisational action. The storywork I like to do is through embodied storytelling workshops I call “Mythic Movement”. I also regularly host public symposiums/discussions on various aspects of human experience, engaging themes such as “friendship”, “love”, and “myth” in collaboration with Wylde Works in Santa Barbara. I have also led memoir and poetry writing workshops. I am open to exploring more modalities and collaborating with you if you have an idea for a way to integrate stories in an embodied/experiential way!
I thank my teachers and collaborators who have inspired me to explore this terrain, and have taught me much along the way: Lucia Horan, Punchdrunk Enrichment, Caroline Lawrence, David Bullen, Christine Plastow, SJ Brady, Alan Irwin, Amy Nash, Holly Mae Haddock, Eddie Ellner, Cynthia Abulafia, Kiaora Fox, Luca Cupery, Dylan Wylde, C.W. Marshall, Mary McAvoy, and many others!
