This week, Dr. Noemí Moncunill will be staying at the CHS and using the library. Dr. Moncunill is currently a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellow at Paris Sorbonne University and King’s College London, where she works on her project “The dawn of writing in Western Mediterranean: a comparative approach to the Iberian epigraphic corpus”. Her main research interests focus on how local protohistoric populations in the Iberian Peninsula shifted from orality to literacy through their coexistence with Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans. As part of this project, she is currently writing one of the new volumes of the collection Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum, published by Reichert Verlag, which will contain the lexicological analysis of the whole Iberian epigraphic corpus (ca. 2,000 inscriptions), and she is organizing (together with Prof. M. Coltelloni-Trannoy) the international symposium “La culture de l’écrit en Méditerranée occidentale à travers les pratiques épigraphiques”.
During her stay at the CHS, Dr. Moncunill will specifically work on the decisive influence of Greek on the development of a new written culture among Iberians, through the introduction of new writing systems and new epigraphic practices. The most eloquent texts in this regard are trade-related documents on lead sheets that undoubtedly stem from a Greek model, and for which a detailed comparative study in light of the Greek tradition may provide relevant data and promising insights. She will be mainly working with a bibliography consisting of Greek epigraphy and palaeography, as well as history of writing and literacy in Antiquity.