I am immensely grateful to the SCS for enabling me to pursue a year of study at Oxford. The structure of the MSt gave me the opportunity to engage on a deeper level with the tragic genre, which had been a goal of mine all through my undergraduate studies. The faculty members who worked with me were wonderful and supportive, and they all helped me develop a better understanding of our field. I had my first encounter with textual criticism in a class on Seneca’s Medea with Stephen Heyworth at Wadham College. This class broadened my perspective on classics as a whole, opening my eyes to the human processes of transmission and to the fluid liveliness of classical texts. I also studied Greek tragedy under the direction of Scott Scullion at Worcester College, and our discussions were illuminating, pushing me both to challenge pre-existing scholarship on otherness within tragedy and to confront my own preconceptions about the genre.
My master’s dissertation, titled “Quidquid Audire Est Metus, Illic Videtur: Ekphrasis and Messenger Rhesis in Euripides’ Bacchae and Seneca’s Thyestes,” was written under the advisement of Gail Trimble at Trinity College, whose advice and support were indispensable throughout the process. The project was immensely beneficial for me; I learned how to critically engage with secondary literature alongside creating my own theoretical framework for textual analysis. I came to the project as someone who wanted to focus on descriptive language and classical tragedy, but with my supervisor’s encouragement, my research extended significantly beyond that. In addition to drawing from canonical tragedians and extant versions of the Progymnasmata texts, the final draft of my dissertation combined narratology, semiotics, and trauma theory to explore the role of the tragic messenger as a witness to violence within his own community.
My MSt provided me with invaluable philological training, but the most important insight I gained was an appreciation for interdisciplinary approaches, and for literary and critical theory in application. Classics should not exist in isolation, and its textual foundations are made all the richer through the interrogation posed by different fields. Such interrogation is vital for our discipline to change for the better. I attended lectures and workshops on cognitive science and tragedy, decolonization of Classics, and spoken Latin, among other topics, and all of these lead me to rethink what I had presupposed about our discipline. I also had the privilege of attending a screening of a BAME-led Medea. The production was a moving, resonant articulation of the power of reclamation. The highlight of my MSt experience was a weekly dramaturgy workshop focused on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, run by Giovanna Di Martino and Estelle Baudou, both of whom are researchers at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD). The workshop explored choral identity, archive-creation, and performance as translation. It lead me to a greater understanding of the myriad potential ways tragedy can be experienced and the dialogue which tragic performance precipitates with its contemporary social world. Our shift to Zoom during the final term experimented with multimedia performance in virtual spaces.
Everything I had planned for my final term, from the many hours in the Bodleian to the all-night epic poetry reading put on by the APGRD, was either cancelled or altered radically after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I finished my degree remotely while staying with my family in Atlanta. Even as the world hung suspended in incredible uncertainty, I was still writing my dissertation and discussing the Agamemnon and dramaturgy. But rather than finding academia a vain endeavor in light of current events, I was and am intensely grateful for what Oxford afforded me in those months—structure, as I met with faculty and other students in workshops and advisement sessions every week; stability, as we supported each other through the challenges of virtual research; and solidarity, as we all participated in the conversations about systemic inequity and oppression taking place in our communities. There was, for all of us, an acute realization of something I had acknowledged vaguely and abstractly before: that we classicists cannot remain isolated from the world in which we live, and that our field cannot remain isolated, either from its harmful historical legacy or from external impetus for progress.
My experience pursuing my MSt galvanized me for a future within classics. It gave me a community that continues to inspire me and a nuanced foundation in classical scholarship on which I will build. A year of focusing on tragedy has strengthened my resolve to pursue it as one of my main areas of research moving forward. I am now starting in the Classics PhD program at UC Berkeley, and I hope to carry through the rest of my career the insights which I have gained over the course of my study at Oxford: the liveliness of classical texts, the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, and the necessity of outreach and a positive evolution within the field.