Alyssa received a BA in English and Classical Studies, with a History minor, from the University of Pennsylvania (2020) and an MSt in English Literature 1550-1700 from Oxford (2021), followed by a year teaching English and Latin. Her dissertation project examines early modern English literary representations of rape (real, imagined, or metaphorical) across authors such as Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Thomas Carew, Shakespeare, and Milton. These classicizing scenes of sexual violence, she argues, operate as sites wherein authors negotiate and dramatize the anxieties and ambitions of humanist imitation and theorize its relationship to ventriloquism and inspiration, in order to navigate the affectively intense and eristic dynamics at the heart of Renaissance literary culture.
