I completed my undergraduate, Masters and Doctorate at Oxford, where I also spent five years as a College Lecturer (Keble, Trinity and Worcester Colleges).

In 2014 I held the Mougins Museums Rome Award at the British School at Rome and served as a research fellow at the University of Warwick, as part of the ARHC-funded Ashmolean Latin Inscriptions Project. In 2016 I began a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, which I then transferred to the University of Birmingham in 2017. Since completing the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, I have been a Lecturer and then Associate Professor in Ancient History at Birmingham.

In 2025-2026 I held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for my project 'Performing Diplomacy in the Roman World: Space, Culture, and Identity'.

My research interests focus on socio-political history of the Roman Republic and Empire, with a particular interest in the nature of Roman imperialism, and Roman attitudes towards their position as a political power in the Mediterranean. 

My first book, Pax and the Politics of Peace (OUP, 2017), examines the two generations that spanned the collapse of the Republic and the Augustan period in order to understand how the concept of pax Romana, as a central ideology of Roman imperialism, evolved. I argue for the integral nature of pax in understanding the changing dynamics of the Roman state through civil war to the creation of a new political system and world-rule. Roman discourses on peace were part of the wider discussion on the way in which Rome conceptualized her Empire and ideas of imperialism.  I am currently a member of Ancient Peace Studies Network.

I have several publications of the role of peace in civil war,  negotiation and diplomacy during civil conflict, and the development of imperial values and iconography. As part of this research I was a member of DFG - GEPRIS - 393553516 - Interner Krieg. Gesellschaft, soziale Ordnung und politischer Konflikt im Altertum (2018-2022), funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I have also co-edited a volume on ‘Rediscovering the Roman Civil Wars of 49-30 BCE: New Approaches, New Evidence’.

I also research the spaces and culture of diplomacy in the ancient world and am currently part of a Spanish funded research network focused on the spaces of diplomacy in the Roman Republic: Proyecto Ianua.  In 2016-2018 I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to examine the production of space as a means of understanding diplomacy as a social practice, particularly in relation to the urban spaces of the city of Rome. I received a British Academy Small Grant (2022-2024) for 'The shape(s) of diplomacy: a dialogue between ancient and contemporary spaces of negotiation', which produced a short podcast series: Debating Diplomacy: Past and Present | Podcast on Spotify. In 2025-2026 I held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to work on my second monograph on the Performance and Theatre of Diplomacy in the Roman World.

I have been invited to present on my research a number of International conferences and research seminars, as well as public lectures and events, including numerous Classical Association branches, and the Being Human Festival (2016 and 2026). I have contributed to a number of podcasts for History Hits' 'The Ancients', as well as BBC Radio 4's When Greek Flew Kites.