Tom Palaima (b. Oct. 6, 1951 Cleveland, Ohio) is Robert M. Armstrong Professor of Classics emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin where he founded and directed the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP) 1986-2024. He is now also a Rawson visiting fellow in Classics at the University of Cincinnati.
Tom has loved songs and poems. Of all the concepts or things the ancient Greeks could have called a ποίημα, literally ‘the end result of the act of making’, they singled out ‘a song poem’. We use songs and poems to share ideas communally and to express thoughts and feelings that cannot be conveyed in images or in words constrained by prose logic.
During early years in Greece (1976-77 and 1978-80), Tom fell in love with Greek poets, ancient and modern, under the tutelage of Richard Burgi. He has taught ancient Greek almost annually in many forms for forty-five years.
A MacArthur fellow for his work with Aegean Bronze Age written records as sources for understanding human cultures, he has devoted decades to researching, teaching and writing about human responses to experiences of war, violence and social injustice, ancient through modern, and about the sociohistorical meanings of the songs that Bob Dylan knows and writes and sings.
Tom was inducted into the American Academy of Arts in Sciences in September 2023, joining the likes of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nelson Mandela, Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Bob Dylan, Carl Blegen, Michael Cosmopoulos, Jack Davis, George Mylonas and Malcolm Wiener.
Please see: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/classics/faculty/palaimat .