Biography

Sessional Instructor for Carleton’s College of Humanities and the University of Ottawa’s Department of Classics and Religious Studies. He received his Hon. BA in Classical Languages from the University of Guelph in 2000, and then went on to complete an MA in Religion and Culture from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2002, where he wrote a thesis on the Greek fragments of Heracleon, the earliest known commentary on the Gospel of John. He received his doctorate in Religious Studies from Université Laval in 2006, where he studied numeric patterning in Coptic Manichaean literature at the Institut d’études anciennes . He is interested in the religious culture of Late Antiquity in both the later Roman and Sasanian Persian contexts, with a specialized focus on the translation and interpretation of texts in Coptic, Greek, and Syriac. He is currently writing a biography of Mani and a commentary on Manichaean fragments found in Titus of Bostra.

Research Interests

• Classics and Religious Studies (languages, history, mythology, rhetoric, ritual)
• Early Christian Literature (canonical and non-canonical)
• Gnostic and Manichaean Studies (Greek and Coptic sources)
• Graeco-Roman Religions (mystery cults, syncretism, hermetica, magical papyri, neoplatonism)

Summer 2013 Courses

• CLCV 1002A   Survey of Greek Civilization (May-June)
• CLCV 2000A Classical Mythology (May-Aug)

Recent Publications

“Parallel Paths: Tracing Manichaean Footprints along the Syriac Book of Steps” in  Breaking the Mind (eds. Heale and Kitchen) (forthcoming)

“Coptic Answers to Manichaean Questions: The Erotapokritic Nature of the Kephalaia” in La littérature des questions et réponses dans l’antiquité profane et chrétienne: De l’enseignement à l’exégèse (Brepols, 2013).

Towards a Manichaean Reading of the Nag Hammadi Codices”  Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies (2012) 3–4

Book: Pentadic Redaction in the Manichaean Kephalaia (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 66; Leiden: Brill, 2009)

Chapter: “The Buddha in Early Christian Literature” in Millennium 6/2009: Jahrbuch zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten Jahrtausends n. Chr. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009).

“From Cybele to Christ: The Transformation of Late Roman Religious Culture” SR: Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 37.1 (2008): 41-61