[1] He worked from 1991 to the time of his death at the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literature, and Cultures of the University of Kentucky.
His primary research and teaching interests were ancient art and material culture, women and gender in Antiquity, as well as Aristophanes and the Greek historians.
[3] Scaife was dedicated to the principle of open access and he believed in the potential of technology to bring the highest levels of scholarship to the widest possible audience.
He also believed in the power of collaborative work, and he was instrumental in building the framework behind projects, such as the Suda on Line, of which he was a founding editor.
His recent work included forging the collaboration that resulted in the high resolution digital imaging of the Venetus A, a 10th-century manuscript of the Iliad located at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, and also the NSF-funded EDUCE project for non-invasive, volumetric scanning technologies for virtually unwrapping and visualizing ancient papyrus scrolls.