Aaron Koller, Yeshiva University; Cook-Crone Research Bye-Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 2022-23

VIEWS Visiting Fellow throughout the 2022-23 academic year

Aaron is working on the history of the alphabet, focusing on a few central questions: (1) What does it mean to invent an alphabet, and how did that happen? (2) If the alphabet is such a brilliant idea, why did it have so little effect for the first 750 years of its existence? (3) How did the alphabet eventually spread throughout the world to become the dominant writing system in all areas except eastern Asia? (4) How does the way a culture writes create identity, and how has the alphabet contributed to that, in the past and in the present?

In his time at VIEWS, Aaron is thinking about some of the visual aspects of the early alphabet. Did scribes think about the aesthetic potential of writing? How was that realized – or not realized – in various cultures? Did they take visual cues from writing systems around them, such as cuneiform or hieroglyphs? How do visual aspects intersect with functional aspects, in making a particular way of writing easier or harder to read?