Visiting Fellows

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Aaron is working on the history of the alphabet, focusing on a few central questions: (1) What does it mean to invent an alphabet, and how did that happen? (2) If the alphabet is such a brilliant idea, why did it have so little effect for the first 750 years of its existence? (3) How did the alphabet eventually spread throughout the world to become the dominant writing system in all areas except eastern Asia? (4) How does the way a culture writes create identity, and how has the alphabet contributed to that, in the past and in the present?

In his time at VIEWS, Aaron is thinking about some of the visual aspects of the early alphabet. Did scribes think about the aesthetic potential of writing? How was that realized – or not realized – in various cultures? Did they take visual cues from writing systems around them, such as cuneiform or hieroglyphs? How do visual aspects intersect with functional aspects, in making a particular way of writing easier or harder to read?

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A long-term friend of the VIEWS project, Tim is the founder of Endangered Alphabets, a charitable organisation based in the US that works to document and support the many writing traditions around the world that are in danger of being lost (see also this review of his Atlas of Endangered Alphabets). His tireless work and fundraising has done a great deal to raise awareness and develop educational materials to help in this mission. He is also a talented wood carver whose artwork is itself a testament to the beauty of writing.

This year Tim launched the inaugural World Endangered Writing Day, 23rd January, which will now be a yearly celebration of the diversity of the world’s writing cultures and an acknowledgement of the work being done to preserve them, as well as a reminder of how much the world has to lose. During his Visiting Fellowship, Tim will give a special lecture as an opener to the VIEWS conference Writing As Visual Experience (WAVE), and will spend much of his time exploring opportunities for funding and collaboration, as well as conducting research for his Red List project.

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Since 2014, Christian Prager has been coordinating the long-term project ‘Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan’ at the University of Bonn, the primary aim of which is to digitise the hieroglyphic text corpus of Classic Mayan culture in order to create the first comprehensive and digital dictionary of this written language(https://classicmayan.org). During his research stay in Cambridge, Christian as a member of the scientific advisory board of VIEWS will be involved in close co-operation with the project participants there. In addition, he will offer a course on Maya writing, give a lecture on digital methods in the study of ancient writing systems and discuss the potential and challenges of 3D documentation of inscriptions using a structured-light scanner on selected objects (work conducted in collaboration with Antje Grothe). He also intends to work on the classification and cataloguing of logographic writing systems from a comparative perspective and to open up emic perspectives in the sources through discussions with the members of VIEWS.

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Emily previously studied Classics at Oxford, based at Brasenose College, and achieved Bachelor of Arts (2016) and Masters (MSt, 2018) degrees there, before going on to complete a PhD (2024) at King’s College London (thesis title: ‘Lapidary’ Latin and Poetic Mediality: Conceptualising the Medium of Poetry in Roman Verse’). She also has experience working with archives (including the KCL Greek Play collection), and has enjoyed teaching literature topics both to undergraduates at KCL and to visiting students in Cambridge. She is also involved in organising regular local community poetry events in Cambridge, as part of Mill Road Poetry Group.

Her research interests include Latin poetry, epigraphy and other forms of textual media, within the broader context of Roman literature, history and culture. Her VIEWS research will consider the visuality of Latin as a writing system: the status of this language as ‘a highly visual and visible phenomenon’ in its own right, developing across the Roman period in dialogue with wider socio-political changes, and with significant implications for our reception of Roman culture and Latin alike.

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Tian obtained his PhD in Egyptian archaeology in 2020 from University College London, focusing on the changes in grave goods in Early Bronze Age Egypt. From 2023 to 2024, he was a Research Associate for Prof. Julia Lovell at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he worked on the early history of archaeology in modern China and was also responsible for translating classic Chinese material into English. His publications range from comparative studies of Egyptian and Chinese writings to the reception of ancient Egypt in China from the Late Imperial period to the present, and the history of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology in China.

Tian’s VIEWS research is a comparative study examining ancient writing systems that were adopted and emulated as visual art forms. It explores how glyphs were removed from their original linguistic and cultural contexts and then integrated into the high culture of other societies. The study features two case studies: one on the Egyptian hieroglyphic signs used as pseudo-glyphs on scarabs from the Levant and furniture from Assyrian palaces, and another on the Chinese characters found as marks on ceramics from Royal Worcester and the interior decoration of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. The study aims to articulate the social and cultural factors that shape the cross-cultural selection and adoption of glyphs as visual elements.

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John Will is a dual PhD student in Hebrew Bible and southern Levantine archaeology at Heidelberg University (Germany) and Tel Aviv University (Israel) as well as a staff member of the excavations at Tel Azekah (Israel) . He is writing his dissertation on the Egyptian cobra in the iconography, material culture, and literature of the southern Levant in the second and first millennia BCE. Cobras are not native to the region, yet as a result of cultural entanglement with Egypt, they constitute a major motif in southern Levantine art and literature during this time. By far the most abundant attestations for this are the 12,000+ seal amulets and impressions found in controlled archaeological contexts in Israel-Palestine and Jordan from the second and first millennia BCE, of which over 1,500 sport a “uraeus,” or upright Egyptian cobra.

During his visit, John Will’s research focus is on these seal amulets and impressions. He is concentrating on the interaction of hieroglyphic and non-hieroglyphic symbols in Levantine social contexts where hieroglyphic signs were not, by and large, understood as graphemes. He is also interested in investigating the longevity of certain motifs and interactions beyond their date of production, as attested by, e.g., second-millennium seals that have been found in mid-first-millennium archaeological contexts. Through these questions, John Will hopes to detail certain southern Levantine responses to New Kingdom Egyptian colonialism, as well as the ways in which these responses continued to shape Levantine culture for many centuries after the New Kingdom’s withdrawal.

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Dr Joshua Fitzgerald is a 2025 Munby Fellow in Bibliography with the Cambridge University Library (CUL) and a Visiting Fellow at St. John’s College, specialising in visual and material culture and Museum Studies of Postclassic and Colonial Nahua (commonly “Aztecs”) ethnohistory. His sources include manuscripts, murals, ornamentation and ephemera crafted by Nahuas from 1300 to 1700, and he has studied the language Nahuatl under Robert Haskett, Stephanie Wood and specialists with the IDIEZ language school of Zacatecas, Mex. Josh’s Munby project focuses on a sixteenth-century Nahuatl-Latin manuscript at the CUL, which is now part of the CUL and Queen Mary University London Hidden in Plain Sight research initiative. He recently finished the 2020-24 Rubinoff JRF in “Art as a Source of Knowledge” (Churchill College) and received an Art History MA (2024).

Previously, Josh was a content specialist and text-encoder for the Getty Research Institute’s Digital Florentine Codex initiative and, before that, he received his History PhD and Museum Studies certification from the University of Oregon (2019), History MA  with the UO (2012) and History BA from the University of Utah (2010). In Cambridge, Josh is affiliated with the CUL Research Institute, Faculty of History, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Centre for Latin American Studies and Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA). His research interests and most recent publications have focused on Mesoamerican and Nahua-Colonial learning sciences and iconographic modalities, warrior women in visual military histories, Mesoamerican zooarchaeology, archaeobotanic archives and foodways and cultural heritage in board games and video games. 

Joining the VIEWS team, Josh will add comparative perspectives via the Nahua-Mixteca writing tradition whilst continuing his investigations into Mesoamerican writing modalities and material representations of human/non-human animal and visual culture of premodern and early modern sources.

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Kit is currently an Associate Professor in the Institute of Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Previously, they gained their PhD from the University of St Andrews with a dissertation focusing on indigenous Catholicism in the Peruvian Andes, and read Archaeology and Anthropology at Christ’s. Their research has been published in American Ethnologist, Latin American Research Review, Hispanic American Historical Review and others.

Kit’s VIEWS work focuses on the Andean knotted cord texts known as khipus. Best known as the textual medium of choice for the Inka Empire (ca. 1400–1532 CE), knowledge of how to read them was suppressed after the Spanish invaded in 1532 and eventually largely lost. Khipu use is now highly endangered but has not fully disappeared—reflecting their resilience, adaptability, and deep roots in the Andes. They were assumed until relatively recently to have been idiosyncratic mnemonic devices, but research increasingly demonstrates that khipus in fact encode meaning via yarn material, twist, ply, and colour, and knot placement, direction and genre. In the Andes, the relationship between the kinaesthetic, visual and auditory are considered central to ways of knowing, and Kit’s research is particularly interested in the conjunction of haptic and visual signifiers in khipu literacy.

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Hannah Bash is a DPhil candidate in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research investigates the intersection of materiality and orality in Northwest Semitic poetic texts. Drawing on methods from oral theory and material culture studies, her work explores how visual and linguistic features of language converge in these ancient texts. Each text elicits a different type of visual and material context — such as the presentation of the script, the use of different colours of ink, accompanying images, and the physical layout of the written lines — and each text utilizes oral strategies in different ways. Ultimately, each text prioritizes different strategies and utilizes different forms of discourse and communicative features in order to convey its communicative load. Hannah’s research interests include the study of poetics, performance, memory, literary traditions, writing practice, and composition history. Her work encompasses a range of texts of texts from the Hebrew Bible and cognate literature, including the Deir ˁAlla Plaster Inscription, the Ugaritic funerary ritual KTU 1.161, the Priestly Blessing found in Numbers 6 and the Ketef Hinnom amulets, and the wedding poem in Psalm 45. Currently, she is writing a critique of past and current scholarship on orality in Northwest Semitic literature, which has not given due consideration to materiality — including visual aspects of writing — and how a text’s materiality interacts with other textual features, including orality.

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Theo Nash is a PhD student at the University of Michigan, where he is investigating regionalism in Mycenaean writing through an integrated archaeological and epigraphic study of the Linear B tablets from Mycenae, Tiryns, and Thebes. This is the first comprehensive study of its type, as work on Linear B writing and scribal activity is almost always done at the site-level. Working with smaller deposits, however, makes comparative study much easier. Though the deposits from Mycenae, Tiryns, and Thebes are limited and incomplete, they still represent valuable information from sites of great cultural and economic importance. Each offers evidence for the place of writing: how many scribes were active, and how were they interacting? Palaeographic similarities, especially the shared use of a rare sign, may be evidence for scribal collaboration or training. Ascertaining how these patterns differ from site can offer an inside view of the practice of writing, breaking down traditional narratives based on general models and replacing them with more robust, bottom-up analyses.     

By treating tablets as artefacts, and writing as the visual record of human activity, his work focusses not just on writing but writers, with the goal of understanding the role that writing played in Bronze Age Greek society. Within the context of the VIEWS project, Linear B also presents an interesting case study in the value of visual approaches to a writing system of very restricted use and texts of very limited circulation.

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Yanru Xu completed her MA degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (Comparative Grammatology) at Southwest University in Chongqing, China. She is currently in the final phase of her PhD studies at the ArchaeoMind Lab, part of the Institute of Archaeology and Ancient Near East at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her comparative thesis explores semantic classifiers in ancient Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphs. These classifiers provide a framework for comparing how the Egyptians and Chinese perceived and interpreted the world around them. Her research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating semiotics, corpus linguistics, digital humanities (utilizing the iClassifier (© Goldwasser, Harel and Nikolaev) digital platform), and network analysis to study ancient complex writing systems.

At VIEWS, she is focusing on the topic “Visual Scenarios in Semantic-Semantic (SS) Compounds (Huiyi Characters) in the Oracle-Bone Inscriptions.” SS compounds are composed of two or more semantic elements, each of which can function as a logogram independently. When these elements combine, they create a new meaning that transcends the simple sum of the individual components. Her objective is to interpret the visual interaction of characters in oracle-bone inscriptions, elucidating the motivation behind the creation of SS compounds and the functional dynamics of these semantic elements. By analyzing the pictorial attributes intrinsic to semantic (or phonetic) elements—attributes that are exclusively perceived visually rather than aurally—the supplementary pictorial scenes conveyed by SS compounds can be recognized as an important component of how this early writing functioned.

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Logan Simpson is a London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) funded PhD researcher at Queen Mary University of London, currently in his final year of study. He completed an MA in Language Documentation and Description from SOAS, University of London, and an MA in Sociology from Shanghai University. Before returning to London for his PhD, he worked as a linguist in an Aboriginal language centre in rural Western Australia. Logan specialises in endangered Indigenous languages and writing systems, focusing on newly invented scripts. His research explores the relationship between language and culture, particularly the impact of writing systems on linguistic preservation and cultural identity.

His research project explores how Indigenous language communities embed cultural elements into scripts they have invented or adopted, particularly in the context of cultural decline. The study aims to understand the impact of these practices on language and cultural vitality. Additionally, it will analyse pre-modern writing systems with similar cultural incorporations. Leveraging the expertise of the VIEWS team, the project will identify ancient scripts and draw parallels between ancient and modern examples to uncover historical influences on language and script vitality. Building on his PhD research that explored scripts incorporating visual cultural elements, the project proposes a detailed grapheme-by-grapheme analysis of numerous scripts. This aims to advance the understanding of ancient and newly invented writing systems and contribute to cultural heritage preservation through digital media and education.

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Richard Sproat is a research scientist at Sakana AI, working on deep learning. Prior to Sakana, he was a research scientist at Google, Japan.

Sproat has published widely in various areas of linguistics and computational linguistics. He has a particular interest in writing and symbol systems, and has published numerous articles in this area, as well as three books: A Computational Theory of Writing Systems(Cambridge, 2000); Language, Technology, and Society(Oxford, 2010); and Symbols: An Evolutionary History from the Stone Age to the Future (SpringerNature, 2023).  Sproat has been invited to various international venues related to writing systems, such as Signs of Writing (Chicago, 2014; Beijing, 2015), and he was a keynote speaker at Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century (Paris, 2022).  He contributed to the Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System(2016), wrote a chapter (with Amalia Gnanadesikan) on writing systems in the Oxford Bibliographies (2018), and contributed the chapter on writing systems to the Oxford History of Phonology(2022). He is on the editorial board of Written Language and Literacy. 

As a Visiting Fellow at VIEWS, Sproat will investigate the use of phonographic elements in heraldic systems, in particular canting arms in European heraldry, and equivalent elements in Japanese kamon.  These are usually visual puns on the family name—e.g. a bear motif in arms for Bearham, and they are reminiscent of phonographic components in proto-writing systems, such as Aztec.  Yet heraldic systems are classic examples of non-linguistic symbol systems. The discovery that one could use symbols for their sound value rather than for their meaning is typically viewed as the key insight that led to full writing systems. Heraldic phonographic elements raise the question: when does a system have enough phonography to be considered writing in the narrow sense? This project will help elucidate this question.

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Dr Helen Magowan is a scholar of classical Japanese literature, art and calligraphy, specializing in premodern Japanese writing. Her PhD project examined how meaning is constructed through calligraphic form in literary texts and visual art, focused on the 17th and 18th centuries. She has a particular interest in writing practices, embodied knowledge, and the visuality of writing. Her interdisciplinary work sits at the crossroads of linguistics, literature, art history, and digital humanities.

Her work has been supported by the Daiwa Scholarship in Japanese Studies, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Aoi Global Research Award. She has been invited to present her research internationally, and has worked with the Fitzwilliam Museum to curate an exhibition titled Women in Japanese Prints (2024), offering visitors curatorial insights on the visual culture of early modern Japan.

Her current research further explores the phenomenology of writing through attention to the materiality and performativity of premodern writing, while critically engaging with its remediation in contemporary digital contexts.

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Daniel Anderson is Research Fellow at the Institute for Classical Studies, where he writes on Ancient Greek poetry down to the Hellenistic period. His current project ‘Modular Structure in Classical Poetry’ is supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme research grant. Anderson completed his PhD in Classics at Cambridge (2017), where he was College Scholar at St John’s College and recipient of a Doctoral Award from SSHRC. He has been Research Associate in Classics (2018–19), then Research Fellow (2019–25) at Coventry University. Anderson edited Spaces for Learning in Antiquity (2024), which resulted from his /organisation of the 69^th Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique (with Raffaella Cribiore) at the Fondation Hardt in 2023. His writings have appeared in Classical Quarterly, Cambridge Classical Journal, Mnemosyne, Ramus, and Philologus. He sits on the Editorial Board of ARGO and on the Classical Association Journals Board.

As Visiting Fellow of the VIEWS project, Anderson will be working on the materiality and visual appearance of ancient Greek letter shapes in educational contexts. The intensive alphabetic training undergone by elementary pupils was not merely about language learning, he suggests, but gave facility in a linguistic tool with a broad range of applications beyond reading and writing, from arithmetic and musical notation to ordering books and cities. In this way, elementary alphabet exercises influenced ancient expectations around the divisibility and permutability of objects.

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Jeiran is a PhD student at the department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she studies animal arts and early writings of the first cities founded in southern Iraq during the Uruk period (3400–2900 BC), and what these images and texts reveal about human-animal relations at this time. The Uruk period is associated with many beginnings in human history: urbanism, writing, statehood and complex administrative institutions to name a few. These developments have been posited as essential to the normative narrative of civilization and what lies at the crux of its extractivist logic: domesticating the wild and the chaotic to usher in the orderly realm of civilization. Jeiran’s research questions this narrative by probing how this new urban lifeworld changed animal-human relations, and whether there was a paradigm shift in the ontologies of wild and domestic animals, and their symbolic and economic status in first cities.

As a VIEWS visiting graduate student, Jeiran aims to show how the word-image dialectic and the shared representational structures evident in pictographic animal signs, early administrative animal tokens, figurines and glyptic images of animals can help us better understand animal epistemologies and forms of knowledge that shaped human-animal relations during the Uruk period. Additionally, through studying the paleographic changes of animal signs during the Uruk period, she hopes to be able to demonstrate how these signs were contingent on the materiality of their referents–the animal beings–and how these changes reflected the unfixed boundaries between the categories of wild and domestic for some animals.

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Adam YEO is a graphic and type design scholar and faculty at Université de Bondoukou, Côte d’Ivoire. He holds a PhD from Nanjing University of the Arts in China and focuses on African script typeface design and Latin typefaces based on African scripts or symbols. In his research, he has been particularly engaged with the Bété script, an unencoded writing system from Côte d’Ivoire, which he aims to help preserve and promote at a digital level in the digital age. He is leading several projects that blend culture, identity, and design. He can speak at international conferences on type design, writing systems, and cultural identities.

As a VIEWS Fellow, Adam will compare the visual elements of Chinese and Bété scripts, focusing on their structure and arrangement. It examines the similarities in stroke structure, symbolism, and graphic elements between the two scripts despite their cultural and linguistic differences. The goal is to explore the cultural, historical, and functional aspects of these scripts to better promote Bété writing by using it in modern typography and design.

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Anna Bertelli is a Classical Archaeologist and assistant professor (Akademische Rätin a.Z.) at the Institute of Archaeological Studies, Ruhr University Bochum. She holds a postgraduate specialization diploma from the Italian School of Archaeology at Athens and a joint PhD from the Universities of Padova and Freiburg, awarded with the travel grant of the German Archaeological Institute.

Her research focuses on hero cults, ancient sacrifice, and the formation of the polis in Crete, with a particular emphasis on material culture. She has participated in numerous international fieldwork projects, especially in Greece and Southern Italy. Since 2023, Dr. Bertelli has directed the Ruhr University Bochum team in a collaborative research agreement with the University of Padova, focusing on the sanctuary of Apollo Pythios in Gortyn (Crete, Greece). Her current project investigates the Early Iron Age phases of the sanctuary, examining intercultural interactions between Crete and the Eastern Mediterranean through architecture, votive offerings, and monumental inscriptions.

At VIEWS, she develops the study LIT. Looking at the Inscribed Temple, exploring how the earliest Greek legal inscriptions on the temple walls were meant to be seen, read, or performed at the dawn of the Archaic period.

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Sveva Elti di Rodeano is a historical linguist specialising in the languages and writing systems of Ancient Anatolia. She holds a degree in Linguistics from Sapienza University (2015), with a thesis on the New Phrygian corpus, and a PhD from the Universities of Udine and Trieste (2020), where she focused on the transmission and contact of first-millennium Anatolian alphabets (Lycian, Lydian, Carian).

Her research interests include historical sociolinguistics, grapholinguistics, semiotics of writing, language contact, and ancient multilingualism. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the CAncAn Project (Communication in Ancient Anatolia, PI: Annick Payne), analysing the communicative function and reception of inscribed objects in Hieroglyphic Luwian, Lydian, and Phrygian through semiotic and narratological frameworks.

As a Visiting Fellow at VIEWS, Sveva investigates the visual-linguistic encoding in Luwian Hieroglyphic script, with a focus on graphematic structures (phonetic and semantic functions of signs) and graphetic variation (form, medium, spatial context). In collaboration with the VIEWS team, she will conduct a comparative analysis with adjacent writing systems to examine inter-script strategies of representation, including iconicity, rhetorical devices (metaphor, synecdoche), and phonetic encoding principles such as the rebus strategy.

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Vincent Morel is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Egyptology at Yale University. His research focuses on written culture in 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE Egypt, with particular attention to the epigraphy and archaeology of Egypt’s Eastern Desert. His work explores writing practices, spatial identity, and human mobility between the Nile Valley and the Red Sea. More broadly, his interests include figurative language, intertextuality, ritual and performance, historical linguistics, and the historiography of/history-writing in ancient Egypt.

His first monograph, Écrire en expédition. Les inscriptions des carrières du Ouadi Hammamat, de l’Ancien à la fin du Moyen Empire (MIFAO 157, Cairo: Ifao, in press), presents the first holistic study of the Old and Middle Kingdom inscriptions carved by Pharaonic expeditions at Wadi Hammamat—a major quarry and corridor bridging the Nile and the Red Sea. Based on recent fieldwork, the book combines material philology, literary analysis, visual semiotics, and landscape archaeology to examine the spatial, visual, and textual dimensions of these inscriptions. It highlights their literary and rhetorical complexity, and the importance of reading them in dialogue with their inscribed environment—a landscape that emerges as a true ‘library in stones.’

As a VIEWS Fellow, Vincent will advance a key strand of his second book project, provisionally titled Graffiti in Network: Space, Identity, & Mobility in the Old Kingdom Eastern Desert. This broader study investigates how writing functioned as a tool of presence, authority, and memory across Egypt’s Eastern Desert, focusing on how Pharaonic expeditions inscribed space and articulated territoriality in mobile contexts. His VIEWS project specifically examines the visual properties of these inscriptions—how they were placed, scaled, and oriented within the landscape—drawing on visual phenomenology, image theory, and the anthropology of art to approach writing as a visual actor embedded in the desert’s spatial and ritual fabric.

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Albert was born on the Taymyr Peninsula, 300 km north of the Arctic Circle. He completed his PhD thesis on Maya Palaeography at Knorozov Centre for Mesoamerican Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities, in 2003. His research interests include logosyllabic writing systems, script typology, methods of decipherment, iconography, and historical linguistics of Mesoamerica and Polynesia. He published on Epi-Olmec, Harrapan, Kohau Rongorongo, Maya, Nahuatl, Teotihuacan, and Zapotec scripts. He is the founder of the projects on Proto-Tepehua-Totonacan (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and on the Nahuatl Hieroglyphic Script (University of Bonn). Albert has carried out linguistic field work in Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Easter Island, and Siberia.

Albert’s VIEWS research is a functional study of the pictoriality of Nahuatl writing, examining how its visual and linguistic components were combined to achieve effective written communication.

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After studying in Siena and Paris, Mia is currently a third-year PhD student at Trinity College Dublin, funded by Research Ireland. Her thesis investigates the phenomenon of reading in the classical Greek world through a multidisciplinary lens, integrating Cognitive Semantics, Developmental Psychology, and Neuroscience.

One strand of her doctoral research consists of the cognitive semantic analysis of reading verbs in classical Greek in order to reconstruct a form of meta-reading awareness, shedding light on how a society with different levels of literacy conceptualised the cognitive act of decoding alphabetic writing. Another strand focuses on the phenomenology of written surfaces, examining features such as directionality and the absence of spacing, to explore how the interaction between graphic forms and spatial constraints shaped the form and structure of what was meant to be read.

At VIEWS, she will analyse a case study from the latter area of research, titled “Reading Gridded Letterforms: Visual Aesthetics and Visual Processing in Greek Stoichedon Style.” The Stoichedon layout, marked by the repetition of a regular alphabetic grid or checkerboard pattern, poses significant cognitive challenges for readers. Her study investigates the interplay between visual aesthetics and cognitive processing in this official epigraphic style.

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Nadia’s research explores systems of craft production in the eastern Mediterranean with a focus on the contexts in which innovations arose and an emphasis on the knowledge and social identities of craft producers. Her current project is exploring the central role of craftspeople in the making of an east Mediterranean exchange system during the late third to early second millennium BCE, with a focus on the contexts in which regional writing systems arose. This project was born out of her postdoctoral research with the SNSF Sinergia “Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant” project (2021–2023) and has received support from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (2024) and by the Getty Scholars Program at the Villa (2025). Nadia earned her Ph.D. in Levantine Archaeology from UCLA. During her time at Cambridge, Nadia will publish the findings from the first systematic analysis of “pseudo-hieroglyphs” on Middle Bronze Age stamp seals from the southern Levant, which challenge a long-held Egyptian hieroglyph imitation model by showcasing how these signs reflect a more nuanced process of script innovation—one enmeshed in iconographic exchange, craft practice, and regional exchange networks.

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