Çï¿ûÊÓƵ

Thomas G Palaima is the Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor emeritus at University of Texas at Austin and Rawson Visiting Fellow at University of Cincinnati (2023-) Palaima is a Macarthur fellow (1985-90) and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala (1994). He now is Secretary General of the UNESCO Comité International Permanent pour les Études Mycéniennes (CIPEM 2025-2030). Palaima is also a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London, and has been awarded three Fulbright fellowships (Greece 1979-80, Austria 1992-93 and Spain 2007). His primary areas of interests in Aegean Prehistory are writing and sealing systems and primary documents (especially palaeography, palatial archives & close interpretations of texts and key terminology) and the development of Greek language and culture and oral poetic tradition 1600 BCE onward. He is author or (co-)editor of eleven scholarly books, including most recently the definitive two-volume edition of the Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean palatial site of Pylos: Palace of Nestor IV.1 and .2 with Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. (†), Jose L. Melena, Dimitri Nakassis and Jean-Pierre Olivier (†) (2025), a mega biblion that is, exceptionally, a mega kalon. His work has covered many aspects of life in the Mycenaean period: writing and literacy (including doodles); paleography and scribal administration; feasting rituals; the ideologies of kingship and manipulation of power; personal and official naming practices; warfare; religion; phusis, metaphusis, and kosmos; labor mobilization; power manipulation; and larger comparative historical evaluations. While a MacArthur fellow (1985-1990), Palaima founded PASP (1986-2024 at UT Austin; now transitioning to University of Cincinnati), a research center concentrating on three scripts (Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A and Linear B) of the prehistoric Aegean area in the second millennium BCE and collaborative study of their texts. PASP has archives of early researchers, especially pertaining to attempts to decipher the scripts (Linear B successfully in 1952). Primary resources include offprints, work notes, correspondence among leading scholarly figures (Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., Alice E. Kober, Michael Ventris, Sir John L. Myres, John Chadwick, Johannes Sundwall, John F. Daniel) and tablet photographs, all made accessible through systematic finding aids. Palaima and PASP have been long been involved with the monograph series Aegeaum, the scholarly journal Minos, and bibliographical databases. Palaima has studied, taught, written and lectured widely on human creative responses to war and violence (see: https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2016/03/Palaima1.pdf) and on music and songs as social commentary (particularly connected with Bob Dylan). See: https://thedylanreview.org/2023/02/01/strutting-and-fretting/ and chapter 30 "Murder Most Foul" of Michael Chasar ed., The Poetry of Bob Dylan (2025). He serves on the editorial advisory boards of The Dylan Review and Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici. For the last 25 years, he has written 300 public intellectual op eds, 100+ book reviews, and dozens of commentaries, poems and articles for Times Higher Education, Athenaeum Review, The Dylan Review, War Literature and the Arts, Chronicle of Higher Education, Texas Observer, Michigan War Studies Review, the Los Angeles Times, Austin American-Statesman, Houston Chronicle and USA Today. For his c.v., see: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/classics/faculty/palaimat.