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 ERC CoG Grant INSCRIBE Invention of Scripts and their Beginnings

She has written several books, 2 with OUP (2012, 2013) and 2 with Feltrinelli

• Il Salto. Figure, segni, parole. Viaggio all’origine dell’immaginazione (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) and China (Chonquing) and Saudi Arabia. Reviews in Libération, Frankfurter Allgemeine, New York Times, Science, Economist, TLS, NYRB, El Pais, etc

Another monograph CUP, Writing and Cognition, out in late 2024

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