Jacobo Myerston

Jacobo Myerston earned his Ph.D. from the Program in the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago after obtaining MAs in Comparative Religion and Classics from the University of Tubingen, Germany. Jacobo is primarily interested in questions about the systemic nature of the ancient Mediterranean world and adjacent regions, focusing on early Greece and its relationship to the Near East. He is the author of the book Language and Cosmos in Greece and Mesopotamia, in which he explores various proto-linguistic traditions that circulated between Greece and Mesopotamia before the establishment of Greekphilosophy. By tracing transcultural dialogues, he highlights the influence of Mesopotamian semantics and hermeneutics on early Greek thinkers. He has investigated similar issues of
cultural interdependency in the ancient world in various articles.

In a distinct line of research, Jacobo investigates Latin American writers' appropriation of classical texts in the 20th and 21st centuries. This project analyzes how Central and South American and Caribbean novelists, theorists, and poets engage with ancient classics to explore the cultural and historical relationship between Latin America and the Western World. Writers like Borges, Bolaño, Aguedas, Rivera Cusicanqui, and others resist contest, amplify, and reinterpret ancient Mediterranean texts, contributing to a critique of Europe, challenging the Western notion of the "purity of cultures." Some findings from this project are already published in academic journals, while a book on the Greeks and Latin America is in preparation.

More recently, Jacobo has become interested in computational methods for studying ancient documents and exploring the problem of cultural diffusion in the ancient world. Preliminary findings of this initiative can be found on the Diogenet project website.