Martin Willis Monroe

M. Willis Monroe is a historian of the ancient Middle East, namely cuneiform cultures from the origins of writing down to the common era. His research focuses on the history of scholarly knowledge and its context within cuneiform society in a range of ancient languages. He is particularly interested in the history of both astronomy and astrology in Babylonia and Assyria as well as the technology of knowledge production (article on cuneiform astral diagrams).

He has participated in excavations of the Neo-Assyrian site of Tušhan in S.E. Turkey. Finally, he is also interested in quantitative approaches to historical sources and teaching/using best practices to responsibly convert rich qualitative sources into well-sourced quantitative data that can be used for historical argumentation.

Dr. Monroe was previously a postdoctoral fellow and research associate at the University of British Columbia from 2016 - 2023. While at UBC he taught for the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies. He received his PhD from Brown University in Assyriology (2016), an MPhil from the School or Oriental and African Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Languages (2008) and a BA from the same institution in Ancient Near Eastern Studies (2007).

Dr. Monroe's first book project is the publication of his dissertation research on Hellenistic astrology from Babylonia under-contract with Brill titled "Celestial Schemata: A Series of Astrological Tables from Seleucid Babylonia".

Apart from cuneiform research Dr. Monroe is also the associate director of the Database of Religious History. This project, started in 2012, attempts to collect high quality scholarly data about the history of religion globally. As a platform it allows user to browse its data like an encyclopedia or conduct quantitative forms of analysis on the history of religion and culture. An overview of the project can be found in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

His future work will look at the interaction between the (modern) division between "scientific" and "religious" texts in the ancient world, with a special focus on cuneiform literature.

Publications (last five years)

M. Willis Monroe and Kerry M. Sonia, “Kūbu, Kummu, and the Netherworld: Interpreting the nigin₂.gar in Cuneiform Literature” Ambiguity in the Ancient Near East, eds. E. Knott and L. K. McCormick, Brepols, under-review.

Caroline Arbuckle MacLeod, Megan Daniels, and M. Willis Monroe

“The Database of Religious History as an Open Access Digital Resource for the Study of the Ancient Mediterranean World” in The Future for the Past: The Digital Humanities in Cultural Heritage, edited by Katie Kelaidis and Zeta Xekalaki. London: Bloomsbury, under-review.

Alstola, Tero, Paola Corò, Rocio Da Riva, Sebastian Fink, Michael Jursa, Ingo Kottsieper, Martin Lang, M. Willis Monroe, Laurie Pearce, Reinhard Pirngruber, Kai Ruffing, Saana Svärd ‘Sources at the End of the Cuneiform Era’. Studia Orientalia Electronica 11, no. 2, 2023: 5–29.

M. Willis Monroe, Rachel Spicer, Gino Canlas, Travis Chilcott, Stephen Christopher, Megan Daniels, Andrew J. Danielson, Matthew Hamm, Caroline Arbuckle MacLeod, William Noseworthy, Ian Randall, Robyn Faith Walsh, Michael Muthukrishna, Edward Slingerland, “On the Category of “Religion”: A Taxonomic Analysis of a Large-Scale Database”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2023.

M. Willis Monroe, “Quantifying Thick Descriptions for the Database of Religious History” Data Science, Human Science, and Ancient Gods: Conversations in Theory and Method, eds. S. Blakely and M. Daniels, Lockwood Press, 2023, 223-246.

“What did the ancient Babylonians discern in the skies above?”, magazine article for Psyche, March 2022.

Kelley, Kathryn and Born, Logan and Monroe, M. Willis and Sarkar, Anoop "On Newly Proposed Proto-Elamite Sign Values" in Iranica Antiqua LVII. 1-25, 2022.

Kelley, Kathryn and Born, Logan and Monroe, M. Willis and Sarkar, Anoop. "Image-aware Language Modeling for Proto-Elamite" in Ferrara, S. and F. Tamburini Advanced Methodologies in the Decipherment of Ancient Writing Systems. Special Supplement of Lingua e Linguaggio XXI.2, 2022.

Born, Logan, Monroe, M., Kelley, Kathryn, and Sarkar, Anoop. "Sequence Models for Document Structure Identification in an Undeciphered Script" in Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022. Association for Computational Linguistics. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Rachel Spicer, M. Willis Monroe, Matthew Hamm, Andrew Danielson, Gino Canlas, Ian Randall, Edward Slingerland, “Religion and Ecology: A Pilot Study Employing the Database of Religious History”, special issue “Ecologies of Belief and Practice: Environmental influences on religion across cultural contexts” in Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, volume 3, 2022.

Danielson AJ, Arbuckle MacLeod C, Hamm MJ, Canlas G, Randall IE, Moreiras Reynaga DK, Weideman J, Monroe MW. “Testing and Disrupting Ontologies: Using the Database of Religious History as a Pedagogical Tool”. Religions. 2022; 13(9):793.

M. Willis Monroe, “Astronomical and Astrological Diagrams from Cuneiform Sources”, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 53, 2022, 338-361.

M. Willis Monroe, “Seeing Stars – Knowing the Sky in Mesopotamia” The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East, eds. K. Neumann and A. Thomason, 2021, 471-488.

Beheim, B., Atkinson, Q. D., Bulbulia, J., Gervais, W., Gray, R. D., Henrich, J., Lang, M., Monroe, M. W., Muthukrishna, M., Norenzayan, A., Purzycki, B. G., Shariff, A., Slingerland, E., Spicer, R., & Willard, A. K. (2021). Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods. Nature, 595(7866), E29–E34.

M. Willis Monroe, “Looking Through the Cracks: Tracing Damage in Textual History”, eds. E. Cole, A. Mandell, MAARAV, 23.1, 2019, 115-135.

M. Willis Monroe, “Mesopotamian Astrology”, Religion Compass, 13.6, 2019.

Teaching

• CLAS 1323 - Discovering Ancient Civilizations
• CLAS 3043 - The Ancient Near East
• CLAS 3306 - Archaeology and the Bible
• CLAS 5103 - Ancient World Modern Issues