Published: Oct. 19, 2015
It is with great excitement that we announce that Classics' Visiting Scholar, Dimitri Nakassis, has been selected as a MacArthur Fellow!
 
Widely known as the "Genius" grants, the MacArthur fellowships are awarded to only a very select few people chosen for their extraordinary creativity and achievements, talent and dedication, and "a marked capacity for self-direction."
For the official description of Nakassis' work and the overwhelming reasons for his selection, see: https://www.macfound.org/fellows/940/
 
And for a brief description of his work while with us last year as a Visiting Associate Professor, in the 2015 Newsletter
 
Congratulations Dimitri!
 
Dimitri Nakassis (Ph.D. Texas 2006) studies the material and textual production of early Greek communities, especially of the Mycenaean societies of Late Bronze Age Greece. His book, Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (Brill 2013), developed new methods for investigating individuals named in the administrative Linear B texts and argued from this evidence that Mycenaean society was far less hierarchical and much more dynamic than it had been considered in the past. He has published articles and book chapters on Homer and Hesiod, Greek religion and history, archaeological survey, Linear A, and the economy, society and prosopography of the Mycenaean world. He is currently writing a second book on political authority in Mycenaean Greece. He is co-director (with Sarah James and Scott Gallimore) of the Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP), a diachronic archaeological survey in southern Greece, and co-director (with Kevin Pluta) of the "Digital Nestor" project, which involves the digital documentation of all the administrative documents from the "Palace of Nestor" at Pylos. In 2015 he was named a MacArthur fellow.