 My research area is called classical reception studies and I research how literature and culture from ancient Greece and Rome has impacted modern cultures in different parts of the world. IS has enabled me to transform my career from one discipline to two disciplines. I started off in the classics department, I'm now working in an English department and that's because I've had three years of uninterrupted research in order to develop a new interdisciplinary research profile. I took a risk when I accepted the fellowship at IS because I resigned from a tenured position in the United States to take up a three-year fellowship and my hope was that having that time to do the research would enable me to relaunch my career as a more serious researcher and in that time I was able to apply for a European Research Council grant, an application which was successful and has allowed me to continue working as primarily a researcher since I left IS. One of the key strengths of an institution like IS is the opportunity to do slow science of the kind that enables you to follow your research track in unexpected directions without necessarily having a specific deadline for a specific end product. One of the reasons I decided to stay in Denmark is because there is public support and institutional support for research in the humanities and that's something that it can be quite rare in the international research world. So that was a big attraction for me and the working conditions in Denmark are more favourable than they are elsewhere in trying to achieve that very difficult work-life balance that academics often struggle to achieve.