Marc Van De Mieroop

Professor, History, Columbia University

Marc Van De Mieroop is a historian of the ancient Near East and Egypt from the beginning of writing to the age of Alexander of Macedon. Besides teaching at Columbia University, he has taught at the University of Oxford and at Yale University. He directs Columbia’s Center for the Ancient Mediterranean.

He has published numerous books and articles on various aspects of ancient Near Eastern history, Egyptian history, and World History with interests ranging from socio-economic and political history to intellectual history. He has also written extensively on historical methodology as it applies to his field of study. In these writings he aims both to present the materials of these fascinating ancient cultures to a broader audience and to explore new paths of research. Several of his books have been translated into multiple languages, including Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia (Princeton University Press, 2015), which was translated into Chinese, Turkish, and Czech. His latest book, Before and After Babel: Writing as resistance in ancient Near Eastern Empires will soon appear with Oxford University Press. He has received various fellowships including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the NEH, and the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna.

Participant In These Roundtable Discussions

Sat
Oct 15th
2022
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Coding and the New Human Phenotype

This conference explores the concept of life, knowledge, and experience through the lens of “code,” examining how meaning is encoded, transmitted, and transformed across biological, digital, and cultural systems. Through five roundtables, it investigates how we reconstruct the past, navigate authenticity in a digital world, interpret fiction and ideas, engage with AI-generated language, and consider the possibility that reality itself may be fundamentally computational—together asking what is gained, and what may be lost, as code increasingly mediates our understanding of the world.