Chiara Palladino is Associate Professor of Classics at Furman University and Chair of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies.

With a background in Classical Philology, Dr. Palladino started working on digital and computational methods in 2016, when she joined the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig. She collaborates with some of the most important Digital Classics initiatives, such as the Perseus Digital Library, the Pelagios Network, and the Digital Classicist Wiki. She is co-lead of various Digital Humanities projects, including the Ugarit Translation Alignment Editor (https://ugarit.ialigner.com/) and the Digital Tolkien Project (https://digitaltolkien.com/). She is also featured in several seminars, symposia, and summer schools, including the Sunoikisis Digital Classics Consortium, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, and the Mellon Sawyer Seminars at Stanford University.

Her current research embraces the areas of geospatial modeling, GIS, and the use of Large Language Models to analyze the travel narratives in Ancient Greek and Roman documents. Her most recent book, "Can’t Touch This: Digital Approaches to Materiality in Cultural Heritage," co-edited with Gabriel Bodard (University of London) and published in Open Access, examines the ethical implications of digital representations of material heritage for processes of decolonization and restitution.

Dr. Palladino loves working with students on digital projects focusing on the ancient world. She has mentored student research on maps of Colonial America, cuneiform inscriptions, Ancient Greek comedy, digital mapping of the Odyssey and of Old Norse sagas, 3D models of Pompeii, GIS modeling of ancient travels, comparative translations of Homer, and sentiment analysis with AI. Her students have published and presented their work in international scholarly venues.

Honors and Awards

• 2024. LECTIO short-term Residential Fellowship, KU Leuven. Project: Digital Representation of Ancient Places. Role: Project Lead.
• 2022-2023. FAPESP Grant Program e-Science (with Faculdade de Ciências e Letras de Araraquara/FCLAR/UNESP Brazil). Digital Classics: linking ancient languages to Portuguese and enhancing an automatic model for translation alignment. Role: Associate Researcher (Pesquisador Associado).
• 2020. NetEx Residential Fellowship, University of Cologne, Institute of Digital Humanities. Project: Named Entity Recognition on Ancient Greek with Conditional Random Fields. Role: Project Lead.
• 2019. EXCELLENT Residential Fellowship, University of Cologne, Institute of Digital Humanities. Named Entity Recognition on Ancient Greek with Conditional Random Fields. Role: Project Lead.
• 2018-2020. Mellon Foundation Public Knowledge Grant: “A Framework for Annotation Interoperability”. Collaboration with Johns Hopkins, Tufts, and Furman University. Role: Project Co-Lead.
• 2017. Conference Grant. Mellon Foundation: Pelagios Commons Networking Grant, Pedagogy Working Group: Conference Pelagios @UVA.
• 2017. Conference Grant. Mellon Foundation: Pelagios Commons Networking Grant, Greek and Roman Antiquity Working Group: Conference Digital Infrastructure for Named Entities Data.
• 2017. Conference Grant. BMBF (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung): Global Philology Project. Role: Research Assistant.
• 2015. Visiting Scholarship. ManuSciences ’15, Franco-German Summer School, Frauenwörth, September 6–12, 2015.
• 2015-2016. DAAD Scholarship, University of Leipzig, Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities. Project: Agathemerus’ Sketch of Geography: From Manuscript to Digital.
• 2014: Italian Ministry of Education: Visiting Research Scholarship, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Abteilung Ägyptologie. Messaggeri della Conoscenza.
• 2014-2018. Italian Ministry of Education: Full PhD Scholarship. Agathemerus’ Sketch of Geography: From Manuscript to Digital.

Education

• Ph. D., University of Bari "Aldo Moro", Ital