Lorenzo Perilli is an Italian classicist and academic at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. A Professor of Classical Philology, he is Head of the Institute of Literature, Philosophy and Art history, and the Director of the interdisciplinary Research Centre in Classics, Mathematics and Philosophy Forms of Knowledge in the Ancient World, established in 2013 and devoted to ancient science and related disciplines. He is Co-director of the periodical Technai. An international journal on ancient science and technology, and serves on the board of the journal of ancient medicine Galenos.
He was educated in Classics at the University of Rome (1983–1989), where he also received his PhD in Philosophy. He was awarded several international research grants and prizes, among them a 2-year grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (University of Munich, Germany, 1996), and the Prize of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage in 2001[1] for his studies on ancient philosophy and science. In 2007 he won the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel International Research Award in Germany, following a nomination by the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences,[2] where he subsequently conducted his research for about one year. In August 2006 he was research associate at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, in 2010 a visiting scholar of the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Zurich, in 2013 Petra Kappert Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, in 2014 a fellow of the Berliner Antike Kolleg, Berlin, in 2017 and 2021 Visiting Professor at Venice International University. In 2019, his critical edition of Galen’s Hippocratic Glossary published for the Berlin Academy of Sciences (CMG) was awarded the Mario Di Nola Prize by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. His work on ancient empiricism has attracted the attention of the mathematician and essayist Nassim N. Taleb at the time when he was writing his best-selling book The Black Swan.[3] He also works as a translator from German, English, French, Dutch.
Perilli’s main fields of research include Ancient Greek medicine (Temple medicine, Hippocrates, Galen, empiricism), the history of ideas, Ancient Greek philosophy and science, textual criticism and classical philology. He is also recognised as an expert in humanities computing.[4]
Perilli’s main publications include among others
He contributed many articles to scholarly journals and conference proceedings.