On a PhD, CREWS and Brexit: a vital experience

On 22nd of June 2016, one day before the Brexit referendum, I had the interview for my studentship at the CREWS Project. I still don’t know where I got the courage to apply for a PhD at the University of Cambridge. Probably from my mum, who told me: “Imagine how many people won’t even apply just because they feel as intimidated as you are right now.” She was right, and I had nothing to lose.

I remember asking my interviewers how a supposed Brexit would change the situation of the project and mine if I were the chosen candidate, as I am a Spanish national and CREWS is fully funded by the European Research Council. They told me not to worry about it, that most probably it wouldn’t happen. While Britain was voting, I got the good news: I was successful in the competition and was invited to do my PhD as part of this project. The bad news came the following morning: the UK had voted to leave the EU. But that would take quite a long time to materialise, in fact, as much as my thesis.

So there I was, in September 2016, arriving for the first time in Cambridge. The months and years to come were happy ones. Although I missed my family, my people, my Madrid, I was feeling truly independent in my personal and professional life. I owned my work and my time, which wasn’t easy at first, but very rewarding once I managed to visualise clearly what I wanted my thesis to look like and how much time I had to finish it.

CREWS Conference Presentations #5 – Writing and Identity

Welcome to the final instalment of this series collecting talks from the CREWS Conference ‘Exploring the Social and Cultural Contexts of Historic Writing Systems‘, which was held last March at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. Our final two talks are:

Dr Katherine McDonald, University of Exeter – Connectivity and competition: alphabets as identities in Italy

Natalia Elvira Astoreca, CREWS, University of Cambridge – Names and authorship in the beginnings of Greek alphabetic writing

We hope you’ve enjoyed this series as much as we did. It was a wonderful conference and we’re very grateful to everyone who came and participated, including those speakers who weren’t able to share their talks in video form. We hope that the proceedings book will be available in the second half of next year.

If you’d like to revisit any of the talks from this conference, the full playlist is available here.

CREWS in Riga, Helsinki and Cambridge

CREWS people have been busy with various conferences this year. In April Rob was involved in organising the conference, “A Corpus and Usage-based approach to Ancient Greek: From the Archaic Period until the Koine”, in Riga, together with colleagues from the University of Leipzig University and the University of Latvia (see here).

The aim was to bring together scholars working on all aspects of Greek language in the way it was actually used, rather than just focusing on an idealised presentation of the language, as has often been the case in more traditional approaches. This approach has, of course, been made possible in the last few decades with the phenomenal increase in computing power and data-storage, making large-scale corpus studies feasible that simply would not have been possible a century or even half a century ago.

An incomplete guide to epigraphy in Greece

This year I spent four and a half months in Greece doing some epigraphical fieldwork, as a visitor to the British School at Athens. This offered me the chance to see many museums and archaeological sites in the country. From my visits I have prepared a small guide of where to find different kinds of inscriptions typical in Greek epigraphy. Please, note that it is incomplete, since it only accounts for the museums and sites that I have visited in the last months during my research and a short vacation in Greece. Feel free to leave comments to let other readers know about wonderful pieces of epigraphy in other Greek museums.

The tomb of Clytemnestra in Mycenae. Photo from HERE.

AWLL’s 11th Workshop in Writing Systems and Literacy – Natalia and Rob in Japan

None of us had ever thought that the study of Ancient Writing Systems would take us to Japan. Luckily, the Association for Written Language and Literacy gave us this opportunity. Robert and Natalia represented the CREWS project in the 11^th Workshop in Writing Systems and Literacy, held by this association at the end of August at the Nanzan University in Nagoya, with the title “Writing Systems: Past, present (… and future?)”. Our colleague Anna Judson was there with us as well and she also has written a post about it, you can read it HERE.

Introduction: Natalia Elvira Astoreca

Hello everyone! My name is Natalia Elvira Astoreca and I’m the new PhD student of the CREWS project. I just started two weeks ago but this new adventure looks very exciting already. During the next three years I will be focusing my research on the origins of the Greek alphabet – or rather the Greek alphabets, because in the early years there were numerous different local systems used in different areas. The other day I was talking with an old friend about Classics and my field of research and she told me “it is so interesting and exciting to know where words come from!” And so I answered “well, I’m trying to find out where letters come from.”

I know it sounds like I’m doing research in something that has been studied before, but I believe that we don’t understand in depth how the invention of the Greek alphabet really was – if we ever get to understand it. Most of the previous studies about the Greek alphabet tried to figure out when it was created, where or how Greeks adapted the Phoenician letters and their shapes to write their own language. The Greeks themselves were very conscious about where their alphabet was taken from: Herodotus called it φοινικήια γράμματα, that is, Phoenician letters.

Phoenician writing. Kilamuwa inscription, 9th century B.C. (Image taken from: University of Southern California)

CREWS News: New team members!

 

Finally the time has come for the exciting project news that I have been waiting to tell you all about! I am delighted to announce that the CREWS project is welcoming two new team members.

 

Dr Philip Boyes will be joining the team on 1^st November as a Research Associate, and will work on the social context of writing at the Late Bronze Age city of Ugarit. Coming from a background of Levantine history and archaeology, the project will benefit greatly from his interdisciplinary approach to developments in writing and their relationship with other sorts of social change.

 

Natalia Elvira Astoreca just joined the team a few days ago as the project’s PhD student, and is going to be working on the early development of the Greek alphabet. With previous experience of research on Cypriot writing and Greek epigraphy, she is going to consider questions such as why and how the early Greek alphabet displayed such a high degree of regional diversity, and how it was related to other alphabetic systems.

 

I am very excited to be working with Philip and Natalia, and looking forward to see the project grow and develop as we conduct our research together. In the meantime you can read about Philip and Natalia on the project’s ‘About’ page HERE.

 

We will be back soon with more posts about writing in the ancient world, including one from Philip introducing his research. Fun times are ahead for the CREWS project!

 

 

~ Pippa Steele (Principal Investigator of the CREWS project)