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 completed a three-summer appointment as Director, 2008-2010. I am currently Creighton's representative on the Advisory Council of the American Academy (I serve on the executive committee of that body), 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 had been named the Professor in Charge of the new ICCS Sicily for the year 2010-2011; the recession has unfortunately brought that program down. In 2011-2012 I served as the Professor in Charge of the ICCS Rome, and thanks to a grant awarded to the ICCS, I finished the year as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in Charge. I am currently working to improve ICCS outreach to constituencies among High School Latin teachers, and have been elected to the ICCS Managing Committee, which is a bit like a board of trustees.

I have been Creighton's Faculty Representative of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. I am a Faculty Associate of the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society and sit on the board of the Kenefick Professor in the Humanities. I was awarded the Creighton College of Arts and Sciences' Dean's Award for Professional Excellence in Tenure Track Teaching in 2011.

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, and an article on fictitious elements of Appian's narrative of the Battle of Pharsalus which appeared in the 2005 volume of the Canadian journal Phoenix. More recently I wrote a chapter on Appian's Civil Wars for the Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography which appeared in 2007, and I am still at work on 12 author-entries for the Brill's New Jacoby project, of which 10 have been published. I am particularly proud of my entries for Appian (237) and A. Postumius Albinus (812). I have written the Appian entry 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. While working on these books I have written an article on a Latin verse inscription, CLE 1142, which I plan to publish with my ICCS students who collaborated with me on it, and an article on the great 1956 SF movie Forbidden Planet, which has been recommended for publication in an anthology of papers on science fiction and the classics. I gave a preliminary version of the paper at an event sponsored by Professor Wendy Wright, the Kenefick Chair in the Humanities at Creighton.

With a great deal of help, I spent the better part of three years developing 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 appeared under that title volume of proceedings. After years of collaboration with the admissions office we created two merit scholarships for incoming students interested in studying classical languages, the Leo Vincent Jacks Scholarships.

I have developed a strong interest in visual culture, and I pursue this interest in part through an ever growing collaborative relationship with the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. I began as the Chair of Creighton's College of Arts and Sciences' Joslyn Museum Committee about six years ago, and developed, with Dean Barbara Braden, the CU at Joslyn lecture series which brings Creighton faculty into the museum to give public presentations on art-related topics. With Meghan C. Freeman I studied a portrait of the emperor Augustus in the Joslyn's collection, and our work led to the portrait's being conserved, placed on display at the museum, and published in the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome (Freeman went on to study Classics at Yale). I am at work on two other Roman portraits in the Joslyn which are being conserved at the Gerald Ford Conservation Center in Omaha as I write, one, of a Severan lady, in collaboration with Claire O'Brien, and the other, probably a relief portrait of a freedman. I organized on Creighton's side and served as the liaison for an internship program at the Joslyn for Creighton students. I am a member of the American Association of Museums and the International Council of Museums.

I am very proud of my collaboration with Dr. Daniel D. Lydiatt in the study of early modern medical texts, in particular, the great anatomists. We have focused for several years on the anatomy of the head and neck, and three papers of ours, "The Historical Latin and Etymology of Selected Terms of the Larynx," and "Historical Vignettes of the Thyroid Gland," and "The Historical Evolution of the Understanding of the Submandibular and Sublingual Salivary Glands" have been published in the journal Clinical Anatomy. I chaired the committee for and directed Dan's MALS thesis, The Influence of the “Final Cause Doctrine” on Anatomists of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Concerning Selected Anatomical Structures of the Head and Neck, for which he was awarded the degree in December 2010. We have published a version of the thesis in the September 2012 issue of The Laryngoscope, the house organ of the Triologic Society.

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. I held a lectureship at Boston University during my tenure as director of the Academy's Classical Summer School.

My extracurricular interests include architecture, geology, astronomy, film scores, philately, pop culture, and travel. I love Dylan Dog fumetti and Penn & Teller's Bullshit! I continue to muddle along as the father of a rambunctious, 11-year-old daughter Genevieve, and I seem to have annexed a 112-year-old house with foundation issues somewhere along the way. If you're interested, you can see pictures at my Facebook account.