Overview
Originally from Tennessee, I moved to North Carolina after graduating from Sewanee University with a BA in both Classics and English. My undergraduate thesis explored Seneca's poetics of exile as a means of Stoically reframing his so-called retirement under Nero. After serving as an AmeriCorps member in the Duke Program in Education between undergrad and grad school, I then went to the University of Michigan: Ann Arbor where I obtained my MA in Classical Languages after passing a Greek and Latin qualifying examination. There, I focused on language study and developed papers on virtue/vice language in Tacitus, named women in Herodotus Book 1, and Medea's agonistic exchange with Jason in Euripides' Medea. I also taught three sections of Greek Myth to 75 students twice per week and assisted the instructor of record with once-weekly general lectures. I attended two semesters of doctoral study on fellowship and appointment at the University of Minnesota's Religions in Antiquity program, and there explored material culture and anthropological approaches to antiquity that changed my approach to scholarship. I contributed weekly scholarly presentations on research findings about social/political aspects of Ancient Corinth based on a combined material culture and literary study and wrote a seminar paper on mythopoesis of Medea in Corinth. In the spring, I served as a teaching assistant for the Greek Religion course and brought in my research on Sapphic scholarly tradition for interested students. In 2021, I transferred to Duke University to begin my PhD. As a nonbinary scholar with disabilities who is also a first-gen student, I always try to center marginalized identities in my work, particularly as a white person in a field with a history of connection to white supremacy and racism. This semester, I am thrilled to be auditing a "history of the field" pedagogical development course devoted entirely to untangling Classics' connection with racism. I am always revisiting my personal and career trajectory to ensure that my productive time is spent meaningfully in pursuit of advancing equity and justice and welcome all learning and development.