People

Associate professor (tenure track) Marja Vierros is the PI of ERC Starting Grant project Digital Grammar of Greek Documentary Papyri. 

Vierros (PhD, University of Helsinki) is working with languages and linguistic variation, language contact and bilingualism using mainly Greek papyrological sources. She has collaborated internationally with both papyrologists and other scholars of the Ancient World, which has lead her to understand widely the Graeco-Roman Antiquity and the methodological needs the field has. Vierros has also hands-on training in papyrology, and she has been a long time a member of the Finnish team (lead by Jaakko Frösén) editing and publishing the dossier of carbonized early Byzantine papyri found in Petra, Jordan. Her combined experience with both papyrology and linguistics guarantee a strong knowledge of the possibilities of using and developing digital resources in the study of the ancient languages.

Vierros is currently also affiliated with the Act of the Scribe. Transmitting Linguistic Knowledge and scribal Practices in Graeco-Roman Antiquity project lead by Martti Leiwo and funded by the Academy of Finland. 

In her published work, she has concentrated especially on linguistic research on Greek papyri and Greek grammar. She has developed new digital approaches for studying Greek papyri, gaining influences from digital research of languages, papyrology and Greek linguistics. 

Dahlgren (PhD, University of Helsinki) works on the language contact between post-classical Greek and Egyptian, focusing on the phonological transfer from Egyptian to the second language Greek spoken in Egypt. She works mainly with papyrological material, using her knowledge of phonological typology and contact linguistics to analyse the nonstandard variation existent in the documentary Greek material. Her international contacts with Coptologists gave her resources to argue Egyptian phonological impact on Greek nonstandard orthography in Egypt, the subject of her PhD dissertation. In her post-doctoral career, she is concentrating on studying Greek in Egypt as a contact variety, Egyptian Greek. Her combined education in Greek and linguistics give her ample skills for linguistically studying the Greek/Egyptian language contact.

Dahlgren is also currently affiliated with the Act of the Scribe. Transmitting Linguistic Knowledge and Scribal Practices in Graeco-Roman Egypt project led by Martti Leiwo and funded by the Academy of Finland.

In her published work, she has concentrated on studying the various aspects related to the phonological level of the language contact between Greek and Egyptian.

7/2018 - 6/2021

Henriksson is a post-doctoral student at the University of Helsinki, working in the fields of Ancient Greek linguistics, theoretical phonology and Digital Humanities. His background is in Ancient Greek philology (MA, 2012) as well as software development, with more than 10 years of professional experience in programming both in and outside of academia.

In his dissertation, Henriksson examines a digital corpus of Ancient Greek poetry from the perspective of theoretical phonology using computational modeling tools. In the PapyGreek project, his main role is to design and develop the research platform that will form the technical basis for the Digital Grammar. This includes the development of tools related to data collection (e.g. automatic tokenization and annotation of textual variants) and data analysis (e.g. XML queries and statistical methods) as well as the public user interface which will open up the project’s results for the larger research community.

In 2018–2019, Henriksson was a Fulbright visiting student at the UCLA Department of Linguistics, where he studied theoretical phonology and computational linguistics. During that period, he further developed his skills in some of the most cutting-edge technologies in the computational analysis of language corpora.

1/2019 - 3/2023

Polina Yordanova is a PhD Student at the University of Helsinki. Her education is in Greek and Latin philology and her main field of work is Digital Humanities with a focus on Digital Epigraphy and Treebanking.

Her master’s thesis is the first digital bilingual edition of Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata with translation alignment of the Greek and Bulgarian texts and complete morpho-syntactic annotation (treebanking).

Yordanova has been involved in a number of epigraphic projects such as the Ancient Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea – IOSPE (King’s College, London) and Telamon (Sofia University, Bulgaria). Most recently she has been a research associate for the Epigraphic Front-End Services - EFES project (Institute of Classical Studies, London), where she was a part of the team developing the platform for publication of epigraphic projects and was responsible for the documentation and training of scholars in the field.

Yordanova is one of the leading experts in Treebanking in Bulgaria. She has been an active contributor to the Perseids project and is a specialist in the Ancient Languages Dependency Treebank framework. She is engaged to create the morpho-syntactic annotation of the papyri from the project’s corpus which will contribute to the Digital Grammar of the language attested in them.