Alyson has long been interested in performance, music, verbal art, pedagogy and aesthetics. As an undergraduate at Occidental College, she majored in Comparative Literature with a focus on Greek tragedy, and also completed a Music major in Violin Performance. After two years in the post-baccalaureate Classics program at UCLA, Alyson came to Stanford to continue studying Classical languages and literary culture. Her dissertation, entitled The Somatics of Style: The Body in Ancient Greek Theories of Verbal Art, explored the centrality of the physical body to conceptualizations of literary language and style in Graeco-Roman antiquity. She successfully passed her dissertation defense in January 2020. While at Stanford, she also enjoyed a wide range of teaching experience, from Greek Mythology to New Testament Greek, Beginning Latin online, and Intermediate Classical Greek. She served as a teaching consultant for the Center for Teaching and Learning, as the graduate representative and faculty liaison for the Classics department, and as producer and president of Stanford Classics in Theater (SCIT). She was the recipient of the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund Fellowship in 2019, and of the Pigott Scholars Program Fellowship in 2017.