Thomas G. Palaima

Thomas G Palaima is the Robert M. Armstrong Centennial Professor and Director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) at University of Texas at Austin. His primary areas of interest are Aegean scripts & prehistory, Greek language, war & violence studies, public intellectual writing, music as social criticism, and Dylanology. 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), he founded PASP, 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 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/). Palaima is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London, and has been awarded three Fulbright fellowships (Greece 1979-80, Austria 1992-93 and Spain 2007). He serves on the editorial advisory boards of The Dylan Review and Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici. For his c.v., see: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/classics/faculty/palaimat .