Silvia Ferrara

Professor of Aegean Philology. She studied Archaeology and Classics at University College London and Oxford. She was JRF in Archaeology at St John’s College, Oxford (2006-2010)

Principal Investigator of the FIS Adv SAPIENCE: Symbols, Preliteracy and Code Evolution (2025-2028)

and of the ERC CoG Grant INSCRIBE Invention of Scripts and their Beginnings (2018-2024)

She has written several books, 2 with Oxford University Press, and 3 with Feltrinelli

• Il Salto. Figure, segni, parole. (2021, translated into French as Avant l’écriture. Signes, figures, paroles, Seuil, into German as Der Sprung, Beck). It won the 2023 literary prize Fondation Martine Aublet, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.

• La Grande Invenzione (2019) translated as The Greatest Invention (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, USA), UK (Picador), Germany (Beck), France (Seuil), Spain (Anagrama), Greece (Patakis), China (Chonquing) and Saudi Arabia.
  
  
• Il Segreto delle Isole, out in Jan 2026.

Another monograph with CUP, Writing and Cognition, is under contract.

3 edited volumes in 2024, with OUP (Writing from Invention to Decipherment), CUP (Cretan Hieroglyphic) and Routledge (Talking Images)