From 2024 I am the UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations at Monash.

I trained as a Classicist but have devoted my entire career to research in early modern intellectual and religious history, with a particular focus on the Latin culture of the early modern Society of Jesus (Jesuits).  I have researched and taught at the universities of Sydney, Cambridge, Bristol and Western Australia.

My first monograph, Loyola's Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (Oxford, 2003), was published as winner of the British Academy Postdoctoral Monographs competition. It explores the phenomenon of early modern priests writing poetry on subjects from the raising of chickens to the aurora borealis, the sublime nature of the 'New World' to Newtonian science.

From 2003-2023 I was the inaugural Cassamarca Foundation Chair of Latin Humanism at the University of Western Australia. In 2017-2018 I was Chair of Latin and Director of the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol. I've also held visiting fellowships at Christ Church College, Oxford, All Souls College, Oxford, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton.

From 2010-2017 I was a foundation Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: 1100-1800, in which I led research teams on 'Passions for Learning' and 'Jesuit Emotions', and a research cluster on 'Language and Emotion'.

I've been recognized as a pioneer in the fields of 'Global Latin' (cf. Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period, co-edited with Juanita Ruys) and the 'Latin Enlightenment', for which I held an ARC Discovery grant 2009-2011. 

I have also been supported by the ARC for research in the history of the imagination and mental health. See my edited collection, Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period (Brepols, 2011).

Current projects include a book on Jesuit poetic pedagogy, 16th-18th centuries, and associated outputs, for the ARC Discovery Project 'The Ancient Today: Living Traditions of Classical Language Education'.

I was elected to the Academy of Humanities in Australia in 2013; to the Academy of Arcadians in Rome in 2022; and to the Academia Latinitati Fovendae in 2023.

My research interests include: language pedagogy; medical and scientific poetry; the reception of Classical authors (Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid..) in Renaissance and later literature; Jesuit culture and its influence in the Americas and Asia; suppression of the Society of Jesus; the Latin Enlightenment; history of the imagination; the emotional health of scholars.

I welcome PhD students with interests in the poetry of science and medicine, humanist education, history of emotions and the imagination, Neo-Latin studies, Jesuit studies, and the Classical Tradition.