at Oxford in 1974 with a doctoral dissertation on late antique art and panegyric, under the direction of Peter Robert Lamont Brown.
While her scholarship continues to have a great impact, she was also a charismatic instructor at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, inspiring many of her students to pursue Late Antiquity as a field of study.
A woman of firm opinions, she enjoyed inviting students and colleagues to long salon style evenings at her home to discuss scholarship and politics (whether at Stanford, Ann Arbor, or South Bend).
She already published a Concise Encyclopedia of Greek and Roman Mythology (Glasgow: William Collins and Sons) under her maiden name Oswalt in 1969.
She revised her doctoral dissertation which she published as Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press) in 1981.
She returned to the field of Late Antiquity with her book The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: the University of California Press) in 1998.