Marlena Whiting '05
When the going gets tough, I remind myself, “I went to Wellesley. I can do anything.'"
It is August. It is 100 degrees outdoors, and not much better indoors. I’m in the library surrounded by piles of books as tall as my computer screen, each relating to a different article I’m working on: pilgrimage, camels, milestones. The midday call to prayer has just sounded and I am looking forward to lunch, which will likely be pita bread, yoghurt and olives, as it is every day. I am a Visiting Fellow in Archaeology at the British Institute in Amman in Jordan, and Wellesley is how I got here.
After graduating from Wellesley in 2005 with a double major in Greek and Medieval/Renaissance Studies, I did a master’s degree in Byzantine Studies and then a doctorate in Archaeology at the University of Oxford. I specialized in the East Mediterranean in the late antique period (AD 300-700), a vibrant period of cultural change and adaptation in the Greek-speaking Near East. The topic of my honors thesis at Wellesley was early Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and this has been at the root of nearly all my subsequent research, including here in Jordan, where I am investigating the conversion of pilgrimage sites from one religious tradition to another. I am about to embark on a three-year early career fellowship at the University of Amsterdam researching the gendering of sacred space in early Christian pilgrimage, an interest I most definitely owe to Wellesley and the classes I took with Mary Lefkowitz and Miranda Marvin. I will also spend a semester at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations at Koç University in Istanbul, where I look forward to meeting many other alumnae!
The beauty of a liberal arts education is that you can study anything your heart desires and know that those skills can be applied to a future career in any field. This is especially true of Classics, where the linguistic and analytical training you receive can be adapted to all walks of life. To keep going on the path towards academic specialization is not the automatic outcome of majoring in Classics. For me, however, as the daughter of scholars of the ancient world (including Margot Stout Whiting, Classical Archaeology, ’71) the archaeological world-view has been too deeply engrained (I went on my first excavation at the age of two) for me to have seriously considered other alternatives! I can’t claim to have “made it” as an academic yet, but I do know that every time I do succeed, the education I received at Wellesley is the reason why. Wellesley is not only where I learned my Greek and Latin, it is also where I learned to hold myself to a higher standard, to push hard and get results. When the going gets tough, I remind myself, “I went to Wellesley. I can do anything.”