Mary Jaeger was born in Heidelberg, Germany, where her father served in the U.S. Army and her mother was a homemaker. She grew up in Minnesota, and earned a B.A. in Classics at Gustavus Adolphus College. Having tasted the beauties of Latin and Greek literature, she hungered for more, went west, and completed her M.A. in Latin, and her Ph.D. in Classics at the University of California at Berkeley. She has taught at the University of Oregon since 1990. Her teaching and research interests fall into three categories: Greek and Latin literature, especially the ancient historians; the use of the classical tradition by later writers; and Greek and Roman food and cookery. Mary's interest in historical writing led to her first book, Livy's Written Rome, which studied how the historian, Livy, represented the city and its monuments. Her latest book, Archimedes in the Roman Imagination, draws on Greek and Roman historians and poets, as well as writers in the classical tradition, in order to examine the figure of the great Sicilian mathematician, Archimedes, as an icon of cultural conflict and exchange. Her interest in food in the ancient Greco-Roman world was sparked by a Roman feast she helped prepared as a first-year Latin student many years ago. She has only recently begun researching, teaching, and speaking on the topic. Mary enjoys teaching a wide range of classes, from surveys of classical Greek and Roman culture aimed at first and second year students, to advanced language courses in Latin and Greek.