Emanuel Mayer

Profile: https://discovery.nus.edu.sg/5401-emanuel-mayer

Associate Professor Ernest Emanuel Mayer holds a PhD in Classical Archaeology from the University of Heidelberg. After completing his doctorate, he spent a year traveling across three continents under the auspices of the German Archaeological Institute’s travel fellowship. Prior to joining the NUS History Department, Assoc Prof Mayer taught at Oxford University, the University of Chicago and Yale-NUS. His work has been supported by numerous grants and prizes, including a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University.

Assoc Prof Mayer’s research is driven by questions of how material evidence can reveal patterns of social, economic and cultural history, and enrich, complement, and contextualise evidence from ancient literature and epigraphy. His scholarly focus on urban life and visual culture has shifted towards the ancient economy and the role of trade and technology in the Roman Empire and beyond. Assoc Prof Mayer’s current work explores the social and cultural consequences of long distance trade between the Mediterranean and India but is mainly concerned with the use of machine learning in the analysis of ancient coins and, by extension, the financial history of pre-industrial societies.