Mark Depauw
Role in Trismegistos Mark Depauw (Deurne, 1968) is the project director (2005-). He sets out the targets Trismegistos tries to reach, and tries to get money for them. Since 2012 he is also responsible for the (sometimes complicated) architecture of the underlying Filemaker databases and for the online MySQL-PHP interfaces. Occasionally he does manual data entry, but his main focus is now on Named Entity Recognition to speed up the expansion of Trismegistos.
Executive summary CV Mark Depauw is a Research Professor and currently also head of Ancient History at the University of Leuven. Up to 2014 he was the History representative for the VABB, a bibliometric dataset developed for the Humanities, used by the Flemish government to complement Thomson-Reuters sciences-oriented ISI.
Mark holds a Master in Classics, and a Master and PhD in Egyptology (all KU Leuven). During his academic career he worked in the Royal Museum of Art and History (Brussels) as well as in University College, Oxford and Cologne (Germany). He has been a visiting professor in Berkeley, Stanford, and Macquarie / Sydney.
Mark is the director of the research platform Trismegistos (www.trismegistos.org), a conglomerate of databases created to overcome borders of discipline and language in the study of the Ancient World (800 BC - AD 800). Trismegistos started in 2004, when Mark obtained a Kovalevskaja Award (1,000,000 EUR) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to go to Cologne and set up his own research team. After his return to Leuven, a permanent position there allowed him to successfully apply for consecutive research grants of the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders), the university and the Hercules Foundation (Creating Identities in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Authority and Social Interaction in Graeco-Roman Egypt, and other projects).
His interest in multilingualism and multiculturalism recently led him to return to the world outside Egypt, expanding Trismegistos’ geographical scope to the Ancient World in general. As such he is currently a partner in the CIP-Europeana EAGLE project, a new collaborative effort for (mainly Latin) epigraphy, where Trismegistos takes care of the disambiguation of textual records amongst all partners through the assignment of unique TM-ids.
Mark’s scholarly specialization is Graeco-Roman Egypt, and his research starts from papyrological and epigraphic sources, combining evidence in the indigenous scripts with that offered by their Greek counterparts. His publications include „A Companion to Demotic Studies‟ (1997) and „The Demotic Letter‟ (2006) as well as other books and numerous articles. He is also the editor of the journal Ancient Society (Peeters publishers), and a member of the steering committee of the interdisciplinary working group ‘Legal Documents in Ancient Societies’, organizing yearly colloquia.
