Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems (VIEWS)

This five-year project, based at the Faculty of Classics, is run by Principal Investigator Pippa Steele. The project employs a research team working on writing systems from Linear A and B and cuneiform to Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan. The VIEWS project hosts a series of Visiting Fellows over its five-year duration. For more details of the project please follow this link.

Visiting Fellowship Competition

We invite applications for two funded VIEWS project Visiting Fellowships, with a deadline of 30th June 2024. The Fellowship is intended to allow the holder to conduct a key piece of research on a theme related to the project’s main areas of research focus (i.e. visual aspects of writing), although this will be interpreted broadly and there are no restrictions concerning the candidate’s discipline or subject matter. The Fellowship is non-stipendiary, and we envisage that most candidates will be under paid employment or a period of study elsewhere, although this is not a requirement. However, the costs of travel and accommodation are covered.

Deadline: 30 June 2024

The VIEWS Team

• Principal Investigator: Pippa Steele, Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Faculty of Classics, and Senior Research Fellow at Magdalene College. She has previously published widely on the writing systems and languages of ancient Cyprus and the Aegean, and recently led an ERC-funded five-year project on Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS, Horizon 2020).
• Research Associate: Jordan Miller. Before joining VIEWS, he completed a DPhil in Egyptology at the University of Oxford, with a thesis on composite figures in ancient Egyptian religious imagery. He has published on Egyptian palaeography, material culture, and religion between the fourth and second millennia BCE, as well as relationships between Egyptology and anthropology.
• Research Associate: Colton Siegmund (PhD University of Chicago) is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Classics. He is currently a post-doctoral research associate on the VIEWS projects acting as a cuneiform specialist. He received his PhD with honors in Cuneiform Studies – Assyriological Focus from the University of Chicago in 2023 (Thesis: “The Morphological Means for Coding Modality in the Sumerian Verbal Complex”).
• Research Associate: Philip Boyes is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. He was previously a member of the CREWS project, where he published a monograph and several articles on the relationship between writing and society in Late Bronze Age Ugarit, as well as co-editing three volumes of conference proceedings. As an archaeologist, he has worked in Tunisia, Turkey, Italy and the UK, and produced a PhD thesis on social change in ‘Phoenicia’ between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages.
• VIEWS PhD Student: Merten Wiltshire is seeking to pursue doctoral research on the writing of the Aegean Bronze Age with the VIEWS studentship. He has followed rather a roundabout path to this point, after studies in many disparate fields. He began with a Bachelor of Arts in history and linguistics and a following fourth-year degree in theoretical linguistics, oriented towards cognitive science, which remains of interest but which did not lend itself to further research. Studying classical languages and mathematics in the years of the pandemic, he became interested in the archaeology and languages of the Bronze Age Aegean and coincidently acquainted with the then-ongoing work of the CREWS project at Cambridge.
• Project Manager: Sarah Lewis previously worked at Regent’s University London, where she was a Data and Research Officer, and then worked with Pippa as project manager for the CREWS project, before joining the VIEWS team in 2022. She enjoys working for a project that has many links to her broader interest in languages, sociolinguistics and language development.