Originally from Sydney, Australia, I’m currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University - Camden and a member of the steering committee for the Gender Studies program. From 2024-26, I am the Director of the Classical Summer School at the American Academy in Rome.
Photo: Elle Pérez, Rome (2023).
Currently I’m at work on my first monograph, tentatively entitled, Youth and Power: Acting Your Age in the Roman Empire, 149 BCE - 79 CE. It takes age, specifically youth, as something that can be performed (i.e., “acting your age”, or not), much like gender, and traces how these performances changed over two hundred years, due to a whole range of historical factors, from demographic conditions to legal and artistic developments. This research has been funded by a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a Getty Library Grant from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
Previous to arriving at Rutgers, I taught in the Department of Classics at Georgetown University (2019-20). I received my PhD from the interdepartmental Classical Studies (CLST) program at Columbia University (NY, USA), where I wrote a dissertation on the history of elite male youth and aging.
In my spare time, I enjoy exploring my American roots, taking photos of the ancient and modern places (and people) I visit, cycling around cities, catching up on fiction and poetry reading, experimenting with new recipes, hiking, and, of course, enjoying the cultural cornucopia of the cities I’ve lived in, not least Philadelphia, where I currently reside.
You can also find me at the Columbia CLST alumni directory, Academia.edu, and you can follow me on Twitter where I tweet under @quidamabo . Check out my blog, if you’d like to see what I’ve been up to and thinking about lately!