Liv Oster

A Boston native and proud Eliotite, Liv Oster concentrated in English with a secondary in Music. Her research has explored the contribution of women artists across media and time periods. During her first two years at Harvard, she worked at the Boston Symphony Orchestra archives curating materials on women students in music composition, as a research assistant at the Radcliffe Institute for a monograph on the avant-garde filmmaker Shirley Clarke, and as a fellow at Houghton Library writing on the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Her senior thesis work on Katherine Philips and Elizabeth Isham’s access to Latin texts in translation won her both a Bowdoin Prize and a Thomas T. Hoopes Prize. Additionally, her writing on Virginia Woolf earned her the Robert Kiely Prize, as well as the opportunity to present at the 2025 International Virginia Woolf conference. She has shared her enthusiasm for the humanities as a tutor at the Harvard College Writing Center. 

An oboe and English horn player, Liv has performed with the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra through all four years of college and was a former member of the Boston Youth Philharmonic Orchestra and of the Harvard/New England Conservatory dual-degree program. She feels lucky to have performed in great halls across the world, including in the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Musikverein in Vienna, the Lotte Concert Hall in Seoul, and the Sala Nezahualcóyotl in Mexico City. Back in Boston, she can be found at early music concerts, dancing to swing jazz, trying to learn the recorder, or taking long walks. 

As the John Eliot scholar at Jesus College, Liv will be pursuing an MPhil in English. She is eager to continue surfacing women’s voices from the Renaissance through Cambridge University’s extensive archival holdings.