Rebekah Rust (USA)

Rebekah Rust
MSt in Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literature

After completing a B.A. in Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was honored to be an Ertegun scholar for the M.St. in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature. During my year at Oxford, I focused on researching the affective state of anger and its correlative relationship with pity in Greek tragedy and comedy as well as the reception of Sophoclean tragedy in the modern dance of Martha Graham. As an Ertegun scholar, my research benefitted from the interdisciplinary scholarly environment created in the House and even to today is still benefitting from methods and perspectives my fellow scholars introduced me to.

Life After Ertegun House

After Oxford, I entered the Ph.D. program in Classics at New York University where I am continuing work on cognitive and affective states in Greek tragedy and comedy. From an initial foray during the M.St., I have gained a greater interest in digital humanities and natural language processing. During the summer of 2018 and through the generous support of the Polonsky Foundation, I trained a convolutional neural network on various tagged Greek texts to detect the affective states of characters in Greek drama (and beyond potentially), a project I am continuing to develop along with my dissertation. When not writing, reading, researching, or teaching, I am enjoying the wonderful city that is New York.