Finding out how and why antiquity matters today is the driving force behind my career. In my research, I apply perspectives from reception studies, cultural history, and media studies to understand how stories, ideas, and art have been transmitted and transformed from antiquity to present-day popular culture, and, conversely, how later periods have reconstructed antiquity time and again.
I have explored, for example, how we can understand similarities between the anti-heroes of modern television and ancient tragedy, what the myth of Narcissus can tell us about communication in the digital society, and how an idea of the 鈥楪olden Age鈥� has made its way from Vergil to Tolkien. In my PhD project, Fantasy Franchises as Classical Epics, I have taken an interdisciplinary approach to interpret the many connections and similarities between the literary epic tradition and modern fantasy franchises like Star Wars, from the appropriation of 鈥榗lassical鈥� plot structures ('the hero's journey' and Aristotle's Poetics) to the way these epics function in transmedia story worlds.