Vanessa is a doctoral candidate in Classical Studies with an FCT-funded research project on emotion, paideia, and cultural identity in Late Antiquity (UI/BD/154560/2022). Exploring the relationship between education, performance, and cognitive approaches to emotion within late antique rhetorical culture, her research focuses particularly on the performative and educational dimensions of declamatory practice, with special attention to Libanius’s declamatory corpus as a case study for the role of declamation in shaping the identity of the learned man. She completed her Master’s degree in 2022 with a dissertation on the reception of Ancient Greek Comedy in the works of Libanius and Choricius, developed as a part of the FCT-funded project Late Achilles in the Classroom and Court (LACC) (PTDC/LLT-LES/30930/2017). Having been integrated as a research member of the Centre for Classical Studies since 2020, she previously worked as an administrative assistant for the Centre and has served as an editorial assistant for Euphrosyne since 2022.