Professor Jonathan Prag
Professor of Ancient History, Faculty of Classics
About
Professor Jonathan Prag is both a historian and a digital humanist. As a historian he works on the imperial expansion of the Roman Republic in the last four centuries BCE, and the western Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the island of Sicily (where he also runs an archaeological excavation). He is particularly interested in the use of epigraphic evidence (ancient inscriptions), and directs a major project to build a comprehensive digital corpus of all the inscriptions from ancient Sicily.
Professor Prag is pioneering both the application of digital methods to the study of ancient inscriptions and the multi-disciplinary study of inscriptions, including linguistics and archaeometry. As part of that work, he is currently leading a project to develop Linked Open Data methodologies for epigraphic data, and has collaborated extensively on a series of projects with Google DeepMind to develop AI models for the study of ancient inscriptions.
Expertise
- Roman Republic
- Roman Imperialism
- Ancient Sicily
- Greek inscriptions
- Latin inscriptions
- Digital Humanities
- Text Encoding and Linked Open Data
- Artificial Intelligence in the study of the Humanities
Selected publications
- ‘Contextualizing Ancient Texts with Generative Neural Networks’, Nature, Assael, Y., Sommerschield, T., Cooley, A., Shillingford, B., Pavlopoulos, J., Suresh, P., Herms, B., Grayston, J., Maynard, B., Dietrich, B., Wulgaert, R., Prag, J., Mullen, A., Mohamed, S. (Nature, July 2025)
- Greek epigraphy in Sicily (Kokalos 61: 47-74, 2024)
- Open Scholarship: Epigraphic Corpora in the Digital Age. Bodel, J., Prag, J.R.W. and Roueché, C. (2024)
- Sicily and Crossreads: a digital epigraphic corpus for ancient Sicily, A. Karivieri, C. Prescott, P. Campbell and K. Göransson (eds.), Trinacria, ‘an island outside time’. International Archaeology in Sicily (Oxbow Books, 2021)
- Bronze rostra from the Egadi Islands off NW Sicily: the Latin inscriptions (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
- The Hellenistic West: Rethinking the Ancient Mediterranean Prag, J.R.W and Quinn J.C. (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
- Auxilia and Gymnasia: A Sicilian Model of Roman Imperialism (Journal of Roman Studies 97: 68-100, 2007)
Media experience
Professor Prag has experience of broadcast interviews and is a contributor to 'Sicily: the Conquered Isle' on PBS America.