The identity of the bicyclist involved in a fatal collision on Embarcadero Road last Monday was confirmed as Sarah Ida Raphaelle Muller by the Santa Clara County Coroner’s Office in a phone call to The Daily. 

Joy Leighton, School of Humanities and Sciences spokesperson, wrote in an email to The Daily that Muller was a doctoral candidate at the Université Paris-Nanterre and was a visiting student researcher in the Department of Classics and a fellow at the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. 

Muller arrived at Stanford in January “and, in a short amount of time, began making friends and colleagues in the Classics community,” Leighton wrote in an email to The Daily.

Classics professor Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, Muller’s faculty mentor, wrote in a statement to The Daily that Muller was a very talented musician and dancer, which shaped the way she thought about and interpreted “the music and dances of the Gods in early Greek poetry.” 

According to her profile in the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Muller was working on a project called “Dance Descriptions and Ekphraseis in Greek Archaic Poetry.”

Her project examined twelve excerpts ranging from Homeric poetry to the fifth century B.C., studying the relationship between poetic dance descriptions and ekphrasis, which are descriptions of an artwork. She also studied how danced poetry describes dance and how a described performance represents the actual performance. 

Peponi wrote that Muller’s presence at Stanford was impactful on the people around her. 

“We are devastated. Her eagerness to share her ideas with us, her extraordinary professionalism, her intellectual curiosity, her luminous smile, all combined with her rare modesty and humbleness, are and will be unforgettable,” Peponi wrote. 

The article was updated to include Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi’s statement to The Daily.