Current research themes include:

'The politics of public space in Republican Rome': I examine the nature of the public/private divide in Republican Rome by focusing not on the gradations of privacy available within the house, but how public space was marked, differentiated, and manipulated. Since completing the monograph, which was awarded the 2017 Goodwin Award by the Society for Classical Studies, I have continued exploring notions of 'the public', 'publicness', and 'public opinion' in Roman Republican politics; a contribution on the role of gender in defining public and private (and vice versa) appeared in TRAC 2015, and has since been republished in Chinese translation.

'Senatorial monuments and political identity': Many major Roman monuments, from the Ara Pacis to the Arch of Constantine, were commissioned and built not by the emperor, but by the senate. How does it affect how we interpret these commissions if we take them seriously as senatorial as well as imperial monuments? This project forms part of an even wider research theme on the creation of imperial ideology at multiple social levels, which resulted in the 2020 edited volume The Social Dynamics of Roman Imperial Imagery. The new model it proposes challenges both top-down (propaganda) and bottom-up (demonstrations of loyalty) approaches, arguing instead that imperial imagery was formed in the context of horizontal relationships, with the emperor as a reference point rather than author or audience.

'POPVLVSQVE': My next major project will be an investigation into the Roman Republican populus, the citizenry incorporated as a group. The populus has sometimes been called Rome's sovereign body, but what does that mean? Sometimes it could be thought of as equivalent to the state (allies of Rome are referred to as 'allies of the populus Romanus'), while at other times it was only one constituent part of the senatus populusque Romanus, the famous SPQR. How do discourses of majoritarianism and republicanism work in a world where the people are figured as the state? How did a group of individuals coalesce into this defiantly singular and unitary institution? Alongside a monograph, this project builds towards interdisciplinary exploration of how individuals come together to form groups which have legal, political, or cultural definition.

'The spatial turn in Roman studies': A series of events and publications looking back at a generation's worth of scholarship on space in the Roman world, and forward to the future. The project considers considering space itself as an actor rather than a backdrop to human activity, and derives conclusions about the nature of space itself, above and beyond locating objects and phenomena in space.

'The tribunate of the plebs': For several years I have been writing a series of articles on the tribunate of the plebs and its place in the political institutions and political culture of the Late Republic. My future plans include an article on the tribunate's place in the political cursus.

'Political culture in the Late Republic': I have recently begun a broader investigation into the political culture of the Late Republic, and in particular the way the concept of political culture has entered scholarly discourse in German-speaking and Anglophone countries. My plans include a volume of new translations for students of important German articles from the past twenty years, co-edited with Prof. Hans Beck.

In 2017 my monograph The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome was awarded the C.J. Goodwin Award of Merit, and in 2018 I was honoured with the  Philip Leverhulme Prize.

I have received grant funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Leverhulme Foundation, and the British Academy.

In 2017 I served as the Guangqi Lecturer at Shanghai Normal University. I have held visiting positions and fellowships at Sydney and the British School at Rome.

I was a founding member of and was co-chair of the Women's Classical Committee UK for 2017-19. I have served as an Athena Swan panellist, and am currently a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, the editorial board of the American Journal of Philology, the Libera Res Publica monograph series (Seville/Zaragoza), and the Approaches to Ancient History series (Mohr Siebeck). I am the Roman History Area Editor for the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

I teach courses on Roman history, historical methodology, and Latin literature.