Stella Fritzell is a PhD Candidate in Greek, Latin, & Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She received her BA in Classical Studies and Music from Carleton College in 2015, and an MA in Classical Studies from Bryn Mawr College in 2019 with a thesis entitled “Atalanta as a Repoussoir for Erotic & Competitive Ephebic Excellence”. Stella’s dissertation investigates the intersection of myth and landscape as it is experienced through the memorialization of fallen (mythical) enemies. Her research interests broadly include: mythology, landscape theory, narratology, performance, classical art, and digital scholarship.
Why did you apply to HASTAC?
I was drawn to the HASTAC Scholars program on account of my interest and work in digital scholarship. In HASTAC, I saw the potential to engage with cross-disciplinary research and discussion to an extent that isn’t often available within the fields of humanities or within academic disciplines in general. The program promised an interdisciplinary and collaborative community. In some ways it has met or exceeded my expectations, and in others it has fallen short. But isn’t that a fact of life?
What has been your favorite course so far as an instructor or student? Why?
Unless we look back to high school, there’s never been a course that I didn’t enjoy to some degree, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. (And my frustrations with that one course in high school had more to do with the instructor teaching it, than they did with the subject matter itself). Part of this has to do, I imagine, with my inclination towards liberal arts education. I attended a liberal arts college as an undergraduate and again as a graduate student, and the scholastic architecture of such schools is intended to encourage the sort of cross-disciplinary thinking that I love to engage with. I am incredibly fortunate to be pursing my PhD in a program designed with cross-disciplinary engagement in mind.
The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Bryn Mawr College consists of two graduate groups, one in Science (Chemistry & Physics) and Mathematics, and the other in Archaeology, Classics, and History of Art. My group offers regular GSems, or interdisciplinary graduate seminars, that are co-taught by faculty members of different disciplines, and supports student enrollment in courses in the other departments. As evidence of this, I took two of my four preliminary examinations for the PhD in Archaeology, and my dissertation committee consists of members from all three departments of my graduate group. While my dissertation is, at its core, a research project in Classics, my exposure to the approaches and theories of other fields has allowed me to think more critically about the contexts in which Greek myths were produced and the media (literary, visual, oral) with which they were transmitted.
What do you want to do after you graduate?
They say that there’s no rest for the wicked, but I would like to take a bit of time off and read some of the books that have slowly been accruing on my TBR list. In regards to longer-term goals, I want to find myself teaching. I initially chose to pursue a PhD because I knew that I wanted to work with college-aged students—the PhD seemed like the most applicable and direct means of working towards this. Teaching is something that I love and that I want to pursue, whether that be as a professor in a college classroom or as someone mentoring and managing digital scholarship projects. I have also recently been thinking about the importance of providing opportunities for adult-education within local communities.
What’s something that people would be surprised to know about you?
I’m a martial artist! I originally started practicing Aikido in college in order to support a friend. When I moved to Philadelphia for graduate school, I needed a non-academic pastime and community, something completely divorced from the topics and people that I encountered daily on campus, so I found a dojo where I could resume my Aikido practice. I have since taught children’s classes at a local YMCA, and for the past three years I have been teaching Aikido as an adjunct instructor in the College of Public Health at Temple University, where my teacher, Yukio Utada, had taught for roughly 45 years before retiring in 2021. Despite coming to Aikido almost on a whim, it has become a central component of my life.
Interestingly enough, my experience as a martial artist has also given me personal insight into certain academic questions. For example, while working on my MA thesis, I was able to seriously consider the depictions of female wrestlers in Greek vase painting and push back against scholarship that interprets such images as purely comic or sexual in nature. More recently, I have read articles that discuss Ancient Greek practices of “armed dancing” and debate the practical applications of such activities. My own experience suggests that these “armed dances” were not simply artistic, ritual performances, as some believe, but rather public displays of martial arts. If this is in fact the case, which I seriously suspect it is, it sheds new light and understanding on the primary sources that discuss and depict these practices.
What are some things that you wish you had known before you got into graduate school?
Graduate school can be incredibly isolating! Friends and family who haven’t been to graduate school themselves, or who went to graduate school for a different degree or in an entirely different field may have difficulty understanding the framework and rational behind your work. For example, they may lack the context for why you might need to take language exams and / or prelims, how advising works, why conferences and networking are so important, what a dissertation involves, your anxieties about the job market, and above all else why you’re willing to spend anywhere from 5-10 years in relative financial precarity to achieve this degree. At the same time, these same people are more likely to appreciate the milestones in your life that are easily waved away in your academic circles. As scholars, we too often brush aside the significance of a conference paper, master’s thesis, journal publication, or PhD dissertation, simply because these activities and achievements are expected and normalized within the academy.
How do you envision HASTAC and higher education in 10 years? Where do you fit in?
The HASTAC Scholars program was recommended to me by a mentor in digital scholarship. Prior to that, I had no awareness of HASTAC—it’s virtually unknown within my and related fields. If I could locate HASTAC among the academic disciplines, I would say that it is well established along the intersections of education (including educational technology) and social sciences, but there is still more work to be done to thoroughly engage with the humanities. This is particularly true for fields in which the type of interdisciplinary, data-driven, and technical thinking encouraged by HASTAC may not emerge organically. I am not in a position to accurately comment on HATAC’s engagement with traditional STEM fields or the arts, but I imagine that constructive steps could be taken in these areas as well. Ten years is simultaneously a great amount of time and very little time at all, but I hope that the future will bring greater interdisciplinary collaboration and dialogue, both within HASTAC and in higher education as a whole. This is something that we can only benefit from.
How does digital scholarship fit into your research or teaching?
My first encounter with digital scholarship was through a 3D modeling / visualization activity that an undergraduate professor implemented in her course on the Roman Republic. At various points over the academic term, we were directed to navigate through SketchUp models of the Roman Forum during different stages of its history. The aim of the assignment was to encourage reflection on how the forum would have been experienced or encountered by an individual during these periods, and to consider how the forum developed in parallel with contemporary events and concerns.
“The forum itself also changed and developed physically over time, and it always reflected the contemporary Roman political, economic, and social concerns and realities. For this reason, visual understanding of this space provides crucial insight into the development of the Republic and the Roman people.”
Assignment description from Dr. Kathryn Steed for Carleton College CLAS 228
This assignment helped me to understand how digital tools and approaches can create new means for accessing the traditional materials of scholarship, and thus make room for new and exciting questions. Digital scholarship gives us greater flexibility in creating access to knowledge and in diversifying learning experiences.
One of the questions foregrounded in this assignment from my undergraduate class—that of how place is experienced—is also central to my own research on local mythologies. It is a question that I have engaged with at various levels and from various angles both as an undergraduate and at all stages of my graduate career. In particular, it led me to develop Mythodikos, a digital mapping project that locates mythical figures in the real-world geographies they were believed to inhabit. It isn’t a perfect tool—there’s plenty of room for errors in both the back-end and front-end processes of data collection and visualization—but in the end, perfection has never been the goal. As a rule, very few digital tools are perfect, and none are capable of providing nuanced interpretations of data. They can, however, assist researchers in asking questions. Mythodikos is meant to be a starting point for research, something that can call attention to patterns and outliers that might otherwise go unnoticed, and thus inspire a more targeted examination. It reframes our perception of myth as something that is not only narrative, but also possesses a geography, and from this it becomes easier to undertake the work of localizing stories within their various geographical, political, and cultural contexts.
What do you hope to accomplish with your research or teaching?
While it may seem like a pipe dream in a field like Classics, which is so frequently conceived of as irrelevant and elitist, I want to open up knowledge and make it more accessible to both academic and non-academic communities. I believe that by incorporating the cross-disciplinary methodologies of my research into my teaching, I can encourage interdisciplinary student engagement with ancient Mediterranean history and culture. In my dissertation, for example, I consider how local traditions of enemy memorialization and associated stories within a landscape contribute to the expression of group identity. As such, this work breaks down traditional scholarly readings that interpret these myths along nationalistic binaries of “good vs. bad”. Though outwardly concerned with stories, my work contributes to a more diverse understanding of the ancient world, and this in turn will allow me to create space for my own students to analyze and debate assumptions about identity in ancient Greece and Rome in the classroom. Like most, I anticipate publishing my completed dissertation as a traditional manuscript, but I also plan to explore additional opportunities for making this research available as an open-access digital publication. My hope is that in doing so, I can encourage more widespread engagement not only with the materials that I personally study, but also with the field of Classics in general.
There are so many additional ways of opening up access to knowledge, and they don’t need to be high tech either! It sometimes surprises me that the same people who express goals of achieving equity within the academy also seem to assume that good teachers and good researchers—or good questions and ideas—can only be cultivated within the context of higher education. It’s a strange contradiction that many people are unaware of, and I’m certainly not trying to point any fingers! As an inherently insular institution, the academy wields significant influence over our interpersonal connections and assumptions about the world. After all, how frequently do we, as academics, really engage with our non-academic communities in settings that aren’t also structured in some way by scholastic frameworks? How often do we interact with our non-academic communities in the absence of other scholastic actors? We need to ask ourselves whether we have ever struck up a conversation at the local bar with a blue-collar worker who installs drywall, or with the bartender who’s worked their way up from dishwasher to co-owner. I’m continuously delighted to discover how much my research resonates with my non-academic community, and I find that when I talk to people in such informal settings, their engagement and questions are frequently inspiring. When we engage our communities in conversation, inviting them into our lives and vice versa, we not only open up the doors and windows of the ivory tower to others, but also travel though them ourselves. It’s important to remember that the academy, while a community itself, exists within and depends upon much larger and more diverse networks of connections. I want to help foster those.
What are you currently reading, watching, or listening to?
At the moment I am rereading Tintenherz by Cornelia Funke, which has reminded me of just how much gets lost in translation (the book is called Inkheart in English editions). Within the first few chapters, there’s an entire paragraph in which the protagonist considers the use of the formal or informal 2nd person address. There’s no way to translate this directly into English, because the formal construction of “you” no longer exists in contemporary usage. I’ve consequently been wondering how this section gets handled in the English editions—maybe I’ll have to look it up! I’ve also been reading a lot of She-Hulk—comics have become my go-to reading material after a day of research when I can’t bear to pick up another word-heavy novel—and the run by Mariko Tamaki has been particularly interesting for its treatment of grief and trauma within the superhero genre.