I am currently teaching an ongoing, multi-quarter online course with my archaeology colleague Prof. Michael Shanks. It's a historical fiction book club called Reading Antiquity and is open to anyone anywhere in the world.

In summer of 2022 I'll be revising my Archaeology of Pompeii class as an online course.

To see all my current courses at Stanford, click here.

I have a new short story in the premiere edition of the Timberline Review, a new literary journal out of Oregon.

Titled Thebes vs. Athens (457 BCE) it tells the story of two ancient Greek soldiers on opposite sides in a war who encounter each other in the forest, alone and cut off from their respective units. One is a member of the famous "Theban Band."

There is a lot of great fiction and poetry in this issue, and if you would like your own copy, find it very reasonably priced at the Timberline Review's website.

An article of mine about torture and its (changing) depiction in films about the ancient Romans was published on The Awl before that awesome website ceased publication:

Now We Are Rome: Ancient Roman torture on film, and modern American torture in the news.

I looked specifically at The Sign of the Cross (1932), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and HBO's Rome (2005 & 2007). I also discussed the history of torture both in Rome and the US, and specifically about our troubling representation of torture in movies.

My novel Pantheon has been named "Book of the Week" by the Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library.

I'm very honored!

I am also on a new list of NH authors who have volunteered, through the NH Writers' Project to speak to local book groups.

I've "played as a Roman in Skyrim" and other games.

Are there any other Roman or ancient world themed games I should be playing?

I have produced six mini "webisodes" of excerpts from Pantheon. Each is done in a different visual style and give an idea of the many flavors, and genres, of the stories of the gods in the novel.

Thanks to generous Kickstarter donors, I was able to hire professional voice actors to read the excerpts. You can think of the videos as visual audiobooks.

To watch the "webisodes", you can click the thumbnail images to the left to open a separate streaming page. You can also view this YouTube playlist which contains them all.

Please like, comment on, and share the videos!

Thank you to the donors! We were funded at 151% in the end, so we have the funds now to create a trailer for Pantheon and six 5-minute "webisodes" with a professional voice actor reading excerpts from the novel. They will be like mini audiobook recordings. When posted to YouTube etc., they will give potential readers an idea of what the book is like.

Look for them to appear soon here and on YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon and other places.

Thank you!

The print version of Pantheon is currently available with a direct deposit discount from the publisher. You can get all 738 pages for less than $20.

You will need to create a free account with the publisher's marketplace to order.

Here is the direct link to the store.