VIEWS: Pippa’s exciting new project!

I am ever so excited to announce that I have been awarded a new Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council, to pursue a new five-year project called VIEWS: Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems! You can read an announcement about it here:

Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems (VIEWS) awarded ERC grant

VIEWS will start up in October, and will investigate the visual properties of pre-modern writing systems (often overlooked in favour of their linguistic properties) as well as their context in wider visual landscapes and visual culture. It will involve some Linear A and B, some cuneiform, some Phoenician, some Egyptian hieroglyphs and even some Mayan – with a whole lot more besides as I’m really keen to get some global perspectives on writing by looking towards other areas such as east Asia, Africa and the Pacific. I’m also particularly interested in pursuing some new research ideas related to writing system vitality and loss, with potential to help us think about how we can revitalise endangered writing systems in the modern day.

As you may have guessed, sadly CREWS is going to be coming to an end this September – but don’t be sad because the website and resources won’t be going anywhere! I’ll be maintaining those long-term and probably even updating them every so often. But CREWS the research project will reach its end, and we’ll be reflecting on what we have achieved and the publications and other outputs we have produced. And I hope that many of you who have followed the CREWS project over the years will be interested in the new VIEWS project, and the new directions in which it will be taking research on early writing. In the meantime there’s plenty more to come from CREWS.

~ Pippa Steele (PI of the CREWS project, and soon to be PI of the VIEWS project)