Alison Traweek earned a B.A. from Columbia University (2003) and an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin (2005), both in Classics, before entering the Penn Ph.D. program in 2005. Her main interest is in archaic Greek poetry and poetics, particularly the creation of genre and literary typologies in antiquity, which is the focus of the dissertation that she is writing under the direction of Sheila Murnaghan. She is also interested in the reception of ancient myths and stories in the modern world, and in linguistic analyses of ancient texts.