Growing Up
As a kid I grew up in a lot of places, but after age 8 I was mostly in South Dakota. My parents descended from austere Swedish Lutherans, Prussian coal haulers, and Scotch-Irish ropemakers from Belfast. I can see the influence of these cultural pathways in my upbringing, and despite that, I very much enjoy researching my ancestry. I have traced many lines of these families back into the early eighteenth century.
College
I started college life as a viola performance major at Indiana University School of Music. I continue to love music, but after a year at conservatory I decided to figure out a different road. I transferred to the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis -- where I got in-state tuition -- and started taking Latin with an eye to a future law degree. The only problem with the law school idea was that I was really good at Latin, and most of all, I liked it! So I started taking history, mythology and Greek classes, and then I was hooked on the study of antiquity. I took a little (but formative) detour with a semester in London studying postmodern British drama and Shakespeare, followed by a summer as a student volunteer excavator at the archaeological excavations at Mochlos, Crete. I eventually graduated from Minnesota in 1992 with a double summa cum laude degree in Classical Civilization and Latin.
Travel
After graduating, I knew I wanted to go to grad school in Classics, but I also wanted to spend some time between undergraduate and graduate school. So, I prepared applications to grad schools a year in advance, and a friend of mine and I took off to see the world, with only a couple of backpacks to our names. We started by working for a couple of months again at the excavations in Mochlos, Crete, and then we went overland through Turkey and Bulgaria to Hungary and the Ukraine. The Soviet Union had just become the "former Soviet Union," so things were in a bit of turmoil, which made traveling in these areas all the more exciting. We got all the way down to the Crimea and then went north through Kiev to Moscow. After the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, we hung out in St Petersburg; from there we also took the trans-Siberian train all the way to Irkutsk, Siberia, where we hopped on to Ulaan Batur, Mongolia (which was amazing). We made our way to China and spent time in Beijing and Shanghai. Then we started to run out of cash, so we made it to Hong Kong where we found jobs to save up for the next leg of our travels (I worked at a pub in Kowloon serving expatriates -- it was great fun! This was when Hong Kong was still British). After a couple of months, we moved on to Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. By that time we had been on the road for essentially eight months, and so we were kind of tired. I decided to fly back to Italy to see Rome (which was of course characteristically lovely), and then made my way back to Athens where I found a job teaching English at a private school (frontisterio). It was there that I found out about my grad school acceptances and made my decisions about which school to attend. I made my way back to the US in the summer and then headed out to grad school in Classics. One of the most interesting things about this whole year-long sojourn is that cell-phones were essentially still a James-Bond kind of technology then (yes, I am old). In other words, we didn't call home much: maybe six times over the course of the year? Instead, we wrote actual LETTERS! I am not sure if my parents were horrified at this lack of contact or secretly thrilled.
Grad School
I packed my stuff in Dakota and drove my junker VW to Austin, TX, where it was hotter than hell in August. I started grad school wanting to study Mycenaean Greece. After a few seminars in other topics, I could no longer be so sure, since pretty much everything was interesting. But through a series of courses in ancient Greek literature and history, I narrowed the topic down to something Greek (!). Crucial to my development, then, was the year I spent at the American School in Classical Studies at Athens as a Fubright Fellow and as the honorary Thomas Day Seymour Fellow (1997-1998). Through the School's traveling and training program, I began to come into my own as a cultural historian, which was a nice complement to my previous concentration in (mostly) philology. I decided to look further into the ancient Boiotians as a cultural group, and so it was in that year that I began thinking about the project that would take me into 2007, when my book on Boiotian ethnicity was published (more on that later). I luckily received a fellowship to stay in Athens for a second year, and during that time (1998-1999) I began the nitty-gritty of researching and piecing together a cogent argument. Returning from Greece, I went back to Texas for a year to write and teach some classes, and I finished my dissertation writing in the spring and summer of 2001 back in Athens. Oh, and I got married during all of this, in May 2000, to a lovely man whom I met in Athens; he is now my Classics colleague at Bucknell University.
My "Job"
The job market in any Humanities field is tough. So, in order to be competitive for jobs in Classics, I tried to gain both teaching and publishing experiences. To that end I taught as an adjunct at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Greek, and History), while finishing up my dissertation. Plus, I was lucky that my graduate program offered me opportunities to teach a few classes here and there (Latin mostly, and Myth). I also worked up a graduate student paper for publication at the end of my training (see my CV under GRBS 2000).
I took my first real job as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Bucknell University (2002-2003); that next year somehow the stars aligned and Bucknell hired both me and my experienced husband as Assistant Professors in separate tenure positions. I have been at Bucknell ever since and am now a tenured Associate Professor. I am also one of two Bucknell National Endowment for the Humanities Chairs in the Humanities for 2009-2012. I teach mostly Greek stuff, although I do the occasional Latin class, since one of my fave authors is Vergil. I really enjoy teaching ancient Greek at both the beginning and advanced levels; and I have had great fun teaching both Euripides and Herodotus in the original. I also really love teaching courses in Classical Mythology, Greek History, and ancient Greek ethnicities and gender identities.
My Family
In addition to working together in a small Classics department (our departmental meetings are notoriously happy and agreeable), my husband and I have two lovely children: Maggie, born in 2004, and Sean, in 2006. They continue to enrich our lives on a daily basis and continue to remind us of what is truly important.