Prof. em. Dr. Antonio Loprieno

At the crossroads of cultural history, linguistics, and institutional economics.

While in the first portion of my academic life (1975–2005) the focus of my research was the comparative study of Egyptian language, literature and religion within the Ancient Near East (see bibliography below), my service as rector of the University of Basel (2005–2015) gave me the opportunity to enlarge my research profile to include two further models: (a) institutional history, and (b) higher education research. Thanks to the move of my academic appointment from the Faculty of Humanities to the Faculty of Business and Economics, these two perspectives have informed my research (and teaching) activity after my return to active academic service in 2015.

My service in academic leadership functions has prompted an increased interest in the institutional role played by universities in the current transition from what I call the institutional turn from the late Nineties on (see How political should universities be?, 2019; Die entzauberte Universität, 2020) to the critical turn of the universities during the digital transformation (Excellence, Relevance, and Critique, 2017; Review P.-A. Alt, 2023). In these contributions, I have tried to analyze how European university systems represents both a motor for and an obstacle to scientific and instructional innovation. The reason for this lies in the location of academic institutions at the crossroads of local expectations (economic, political, professorial, etc.) and global pressures (from scientific peers, international rankings, etc.). Solutions to this dilemma often does not rely on conventional organizational knowledge, but must be founded upon institution-specific, “adhocratic” strategic decisions by the university leadership. I am currently working at a formal modelling of European university governance under these changed conditions, including the emerging need for “science advice” at the Swiss and international (especially EU) level.

The development of my research interests in the last five years has been affected on the one hand by the institutional economic paradigm referred to above, on the other hand by my participation in two large scale research projects. After completing, together with two collaborators, a grammar of Egyptian nominal patterns (Non-verbal Predication in Ancient Egyptian, 2016) which had been delayed by my service in academic leadership, I participated in the NCCR “Eikones” and codirected the module “Materiality and Semantics of Writing”. Within this project, my main concern has been the historical investigation of the pictorial, i.e., nonlinguistic features of Egyptian scripts, and of writing in general. The underlying conceptual model distinguishes between an intensional i-writing, which is universal and governs the relationship between the two articulations of language (semantic and phonetic), and an extensional e-script, which is culturally bound and governs the distribution of more pictorial (proximal) and more stylized (distal) forms of writing.

The second large-scale project that I directed in recent years has been a trinational research program at the interface of papyrology, informatics, and material studies on the “heterogeneous”, i.e., multi-textual papyri from the Egyptian village of Deir el-Medina in the Museo Egizio in Turin (Crossing Boundaries. Understanding Scribal Practices, 2019–2023). Within this research perspective, I am interested in Egyptian “standardization” phenomena (Standardization in Egyptian, 2020). I understand “standardization” as the trace of economy in language history, i.e., of the tendency of languages to secure their resilience as cultural institutions in constant need of maintenance. Standardization processes are concerned with linguistic forms, but also affect specific discourse practices, because they are meant to reduce the transaction costs arising from the use of language in general.

My research on “authorship”, on the other hand (Authorship in Egyptian literature, 2019) focuses on the institutional peculiarity that in Ancient Egypt, the putative composer of an original text and the actual copyist who wrote it down represent the two poles of a cultural spectrum from model authors to factual scribes. Finally, in recent years I have also worked on Egyptian social institutions such as “coerced labor” (Slavery in Pharaonic and Hellenistic Egypt, 2022), which only in the Iron Age acquired the legally codified features which we usually associate with the term “slavery”. My research leads me to the hypothesis that the dramatic innovations in the Mediterranean Iron Age prompted a different approach not only to property, but also to what is proper. It is not by chance that in European languages the propriety of “property” and the value of “values” are carried by the same lexical roots – and continue to be a topic of intense debate.