Rosalie Stoner is a first-year Teaching Fellow in the Department of Classics and in the College. After finishing her AB in Classics (summa cum laude with a certificate in Medieval Studies) from Princeton University in 2015, she earned her MA (2017) and PhD (2021) in Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “Making the Moral Orator: Wanting the Good in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria,” examines Quintilian’s portrayal of the ideal orator (vir bonus dicendi peritus, “a good man skilled in speaking”) as a response to the Platonic problem of how to ensure that a trained speaker uses the power of speech for good and not for evil. The dissertation argues that, by accepting the invitation of Quintilian’s authorial persona to enter into a series of relationships outlined and mediated by the Institutio—teacher and student, father and son, and friendship—the reader is empowered to experience the education of the virtuous orator and so develop the bona voluntas that Quintilian claims is the text’s most important legacy.
Her wider interests include ideals and practices of education in the ancient world; the Roman oratorical tradition from Cato to Augustine; early Christian transformations of classical traditions; competition and tension between rhetoric and philosophy; and Platonic reception.