Hello!  I’m a literary scholar and a cultural historian. I trace the smallest turns of language to uncover the largest ideas—close reading classical and not-so-classical texts for their hidden philosophical provocations.

I'm the author of three books: The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries; A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter; and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature. 

My work has been translated into seven languages and reviewed in the New Yorker and Wall Street Journal. I've appeared on BBC radio and Swiss TV's philosophy program Sternstunde. I've been lucky to have received fellowships from the Warburg Institute in London, Villa I Tatti in Florence and the Wiko in Berlin. My PhD is in comparative literature from Princeton.

Loves: microcosms, architecture of libraries, typography, fragments, Erich Auerbach

Activities: reading, running, libido sciendi, listening to Mahler symphonies, offering refreshments to friends and strangers.

I teach at Yale-NUS College, Singapore and I was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for the 2023-24 academic year.