Vanessa Stovall received the MA in Classical Studies at Columbia University in Fall 2019. Prior to this, she graduated from The Evergreen State College with a B.A. in Classics in the fall of 2015. She completed her undergraduate education with a capstone thesis, "An Efficacious Oresteia: A Tragic Look at Athenian Society through the House of Atreus", that analyzed jointly Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Orestes; as a framework and commentary of Athenian society from the Persian to the Peloponnesian Wars.
Vanessa has been interested in studying the classics from a young age, when she realized that every book about Greek mythology she read presented different interpretations of the same myths. This interest was only piqued after four years of studying Latin in high school, which lead her to continue her studies at TESC. In her final year there, she also taught Latin at a Beginning and Intermediate level to undergraduate students as a teacher's aid in the program Greece and Italy: An Artistic and Literary Odyssey, and was able to travel abroad to Greece and Italy to study Homer, Virgil, and Dante with the class. Furthermore, she volunteered at the annual Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest Meeting when it was hosted at TESC, and presented her undergraduate thesis at the Northwest Undergraduate Conference of the Ancient World.
Going forward with her education, Vanessa intends to further her studies in Latin literature and Attic drama, as well as fully pursuing her interests in mythography, as she was not able to do so during her undergraduate education. She would also like to further study archaeology and classical pedagogy, and to broaden her base knowledge as a classicist more generally. She one day hopes to help make her field of study more accessible, particularly at a non-collegiate level. Email Vanessa Stovall.