Shannon Oliver White is a third-year PhD student in classical studies. His research interests include sociopolitical and cultural development in the eastern Mediterranean and the history of Greek colonies.
Shannon received a BA in classical languages from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. His honors thesis, “Western Anatolia or Eastern Greece?: Navigating Identity in the Archaic ‘Borderlands,’” discussed community identity and early state formation in Greek settlements along the Anatolian coast, seeking to reconceptualize ethnicity and self-identification in a historically fluid region. His MA focused on analyzing historical accounts of stasis in the Milesian peninsula in relation to economic class, ethnicity, and land use at the site in the 6th century BCE.
As an undergraduate, he fostered his interest in pre-classical Greece and Anatolia while working alongside the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, handling excavation data from the Center’s sites at Nemea and Mycenae. Since 2024, he has excavated at the ancient Macedonian city of Pella as part of the Pella Urban Dynamics Project. For his work in ancient languages and history at Berkeley, he was awarded the Charles E. Murgia Prize in Elementary Latin (2021) and the Chair’s Award for Distinction in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (2023). He is currently a Lead Teaching Fellow at Columbia.