My present position is that of Professor and Chair of Greek History in the Department of Ancient History at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. I am also affiliated with McGill University in Montreal as Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Arts. Orcid ID: 0000-0002-0319-1186

I did my undergrad degree at the Friedrich Alexander University at Erlangen-Nuremberg (MA 1993, back then the first degree in Germany) and the University of Kent, and grad studies at Erlangen-Nuremberg and Cambridge University, St. Edmund’s College (Dr. phil. 1996). In 1997 I was fortunate enough to land a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Cologne. The Cologne years set the pace in many ways. Much of this had to do with the fact that I was part of an exciting academic team that was lucky enough to work under the mentorship of Karl-J. Hölkeskamp. In 2003 I finished up my Habilitation in Ancient History there, after a one year break at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. In 2004, I started a Heisenberg Fellowship of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft at Frankfurt University. A little later, in 2005, I was hired to the position of John MacNaughton Chair of Classics and Professor of Ancient History at McGill University in Montreal.

Working at McGill has been an extremely rewarding experience. While the Humanities were contracting, we were vigorously branching out. It was thrilling to see how our team was able to shape a boutique academic enterprise in the best sense of the word. From 2007 to 2016 I served as Director of Classical Studies which was long enough, I guess.

In 2018, I was elected into the Royal Society of Canada, an honour that touched me more than I can express here. At around the same time, the University of Münster offered me its chair in Greek History and I accepted. It is terrific to partake in such a vibrant hub of Ancient World Studies. Beyond Münster and the many ongoing institutional partnerships in place, collaborations with colleagues abroad remains vital to my work. At this point, the main toeholds of ongoing international research collaborations include Classics and Ancient History departments in Athens, Sydney, Auckland, and Philadelphia as well as the Waterloo Institute for Hellenistic Studies. I am happy to see that my previous and current grad students play a lively part in those partnerships.

My areas of scholarly interest cluster in the periods of Archaic and Classical Greece and the Roman Republic: designs of polis governance and federalism; historical environments; dynamics between localism and 'globalization' (Greece); and the political culture of the Roman republic. Across antiquity, I am interested in memorial practices as manifested in festivals and monuments, and in ancient historiography and critical thinking. All this relates in one way or the other to the attempt to grasp, and decipher, the codes of societal cohesion in the ancient world. 

I have won several fellowships and research grants from funding agencies in Canada, Germany, and the USA to support my work, for which I am genuinely grateful. In 2015, I was awarded the Anneliese Maier Research Prize of the Humboldt Foundation. The award allowed me to carry out a broad array of projects on localism and the local in ancient Greece, which is on my agenda ever since. Much of this continues in Münster’s Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics, which I joined in 2020. A fellowship of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Legal Unity and Pluralism in 2022-23 allowed me to explore Greek Law from a localized perspective. While at McGill, I was the Co-Director of the McGill-based Global Antiquities Research Network, an international group that explores the ancient worlds of Greece, Rome, and China from a comparative perspective. In 2020, I was elected a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute.

Major editorial board commitments include Teiresias Journal Online plus its book series Teiresias Supplements Online, Hermes. Zeitschrift für Klassische Philologie and the corresponding Hermes Einzelschriften, and Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte (OGG). Along with Jeremy McInerney and Christy Contantakopoulou I am currently editing the all-new Oxford History of the Classical Greek World (seven volumes), and, with Tamar Hodos and Carlos Noreña, the new series Antiquity in Global Context (CUP).

If anyone is really interested in what I do in my spare time, I enjoy bbqing for my family and friends, watching a good soccer or hockey game, riding my motorcycle, and pursuing my lifelong interest in heavy metal. Oh, and yes, I am a member of the FC Bayern München fan club in my small hometown in southern Germany.