Shelby is from California. She attended UC Berkeley where she studied Comparative Literature with French and Rhetoric as her concentrations. She also studied Arabic and received two FLAS (Foreign Language and area studies) fellowship grants from the Department of Education to study both languages abroad. She participated in her major’s Undergraduate Journal and annual Comparative Literature research symposium at UC Berkeley, in addition to working as a research assistant.
During HILI, she plans to study the genre of Anecdotal history - its foundations in Byzantine texts and its iterations in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is interested in medieval history (particularly in the Mediterranean), religious philosophy, and human geography.
She enjoys cooking, drinking coffee, flânant and learning Italian.
