Shannon Oliver White is a first-year PhD student in classical studies. His research interests include sociopolitical and cultural development in the eastern Mediterranean, the history of Greek colonies, and early Greek literature.
Shannon received a BA in classical languages from the University of California, Berkeley in December 2022. His honors thesis, “Western Anatolia or Eastern Greece?: Navigating Identity in the Archaic ‘Borderlands,’” discussed identity and early state formation in Greek settlements along the Anatolian coast, seeking to reconceptualize ethnicity and self-identification in a historically fluid region.
He fostered this interest in pre-classical Greece and Anatolia while working alongside the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology, handling excavation data from the center’s sites in Nemea and Mycenae. Additionally, he spent several years as an undergraduate working as an editor, researcher, and writer for the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library. 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 (2022/2023).