Jacobo Myerston

Jacobo Myerston studied Classics in Mérida, Venezuela, and earned a Ph.D. in Ancient Mediterranean Studies from the University of Chicago. He also holds M.A. degrees in Greek Philology and Comparative Religions from the University of Tübingen, Germany. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature and the Program in Classical Studies.

His research focuses on ancient Greek and Sumero-Akkadian texts, which he examines through multiple lenses, including cultural studies, computational sociology, linguistics, and digital humanities. In addition to his work on ancient Greece and the literatures of ancient Iraq, he is interested in how Latin American scholars and intellectuals have studied and interpreted the ancient world.

He regularly teaches courses on ancient Greek and Babylonian literatures, Mediterranean mythology, ancient magic, race in the ancient world, and ancient Greek language.

Languages: Ancient Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian, German, Portuguese, Spanish

Articles & Book Chapters

• “LogogramNLP: Comparing Visual and Textual Representations of Ancient Logographic Writing Systems for NLP.” In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), edited by Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, and Vivek Srikumar, 14238–54. Bangkok, Thailand: Association for Computational Linguistics (2024).  LINK
• “Classification of Paleographic Artifacts at Scale: Mitigating Confounds and Distribution Shift in Cuneiform Tablet Dating.” In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Machine Learning for Ancient Languages (ML4AL 2024), edited by John Pavlopoulos, Thea Sommerschield, Yannis Assael, Shai Gordin, Kyunghyun Cho, Marco Passarotti, Rachele Sprugnoli, Yudong Liu, Bin Li, and Adam Anderson, 30–41. Hybrid in Bangkok, Thailand and online: Association for Computational Linguistics (2024).  LINK
• “CuneiML: A Cuneiform Dataset for Machine Learning.” Journal of Open Humanities Data 9 (1) (2023).  LINK
• “Variations on Violence in Akkadian and Greek Succession Myths.” Trends in Classics 14 (1): 1–35 (2022).
• “The Classicist in the Cave: Bolaño’s Theory of Reading in By Night in Chile.” Classical Receptions Journal 8 (4): 554–73 (2016).  LINK
• “Divine Names in the Derveni Papyrus and Mesopotamian Hermeneutics.” Trends in Classics 5 (1): 74–110 (2013).  LINK

Digital Humanities

• Ancient Greek Syntax Analyzer  LINK
• greCy: Ancient Greek models for spaCy  LINK
• A Named Entity Corpus of Ancient Greek  LINK

• Ph.D. in Ancient Mediterranean Studies, University of Chicago, 2013
• M.A. in Classical Philology, 2000
• M.A. in Studies of Religion, 2000