Co-PI (with Baruch Halpern, Penn State University) for $105,000 Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Program Award for "Cultural Exchange and Appropriation in the Mediterranean World." This work is under contract with Brill Press, in one or two volumes.

I am currently working on a book-length project, Emerson's Civil War

The Political Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson for The Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge University Press, 2008

Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance (Princeton University Press, May 2003) Major reviews include the Times Literary Supplement 25 July, 2003, pp. 3-4, and the New Yorker 4 August, 2003, pp. 77-80 (by John Updike). Second printing ordered in July, 2003.

Diodorus Siculus and the First Century (Princeton University Press, 1990) Listed among "Outstanding Academic Books of 1991," by Choice

Polybius on the Writing of History (University of California Press, 1981)

Rabbi Joseph L. Baron Faculty Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning for Outstanding Academic Leadership in the State (1993: $1000 prize)
Included in Wisconsin Students' Association "Top One Hundred Educators at University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison," 1992
Teaching Excellence Award (University of Wisconsin), 1992
Included in "UW's 50 Great Teachers of Independent Thought" by the Wisconsin Student Association, 1991
Senior Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1987-1988
Visiting Fellow, Department of Classics, Princeton University, 1985-1986
Vilas Associate, University of Wisconsin, 1985-1987
Summer Fellow, the American Numismatic Society, 1981
Fellow, University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, 1980-1981
Fellow, The American Council of Learned Societies, 1978-1979

Senior Fellow, Wayland Collegium, 2005-2008
Member, Board of Administration, Howard Foundation, 2003-2011
Graduate Council, 2002-2005
Director of Undergraduate Studies, 2002-
Departmental Academic Priorities Committee, 2002-
Executive Committee, Program on Ancient Studies, 1998-

Ancient Hellenistic History: I specialize in the history of ideas, and thus cover especially aspects of philosophy and religion from roughly the time of Alexander the Great through the end of the Roman Empire

American Transcendentalism: the social, philosophical, and political thought of Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller