Stephen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Florida State University. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Classics at Cornell University and fellow in the Active Learning Initiative. He specializes in early Greek poetry and its reception, especially epic, aesthetics, and digital humanities. He will be a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in fall 2024 and an NEH fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in spring 2025.

His monograph project, Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles and Early Greek Aesthetics, is the first book-length investigation into the role of the archaic Shield of Heracles in Hesiod’s cosmology. Instead of debating the Shield’s authorship—a roadblock that has stymied the poem since antiquity—this book shows how the Shield mobilizes media, such as speech, ekphrasis, and the senses, to flesh out the cosmos of Zeus and its work in the world.

His second book, provisionally titled Patterns of Expectancy in Greek Epic: Where Words Belong, uses data science and close reading to investigate the expectations generated by the metrical position of words over the thousand-year history of Greek hexameter poetry.

More generally, Stephen’s work explores lived experience in Greek poetry and the ways we can model its work. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Philology, TAPA, Classical Philology, Classical Quarterly, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Greece & Rome, Mnemosyne, Classical World, Classical Review, Journal for Hellenic Studies, CJ-Online, BMCR, Eidolon, and for the Society for Classical Studies.

Stephen received his PhD in Classics from Stanford University in 2018.