Marja Vierros studied Greek language and literature as well as Latin language and Roman literature at the University of Helsinki, where she received her Ph.D. in 2011. Her Ph.D. thesis analysed the Greek language of the bilingual papyrus archives from Ptolemaic Upper Egypt and was published as a monograph in 2012 (Bilingual notaries in Hellenistic Egypt. A study of Greek as a second language. Collectanea Hellenistica V. Brussel)
Broadly said her research interest is language contact and language variation in the Greek world from the Hellenistic to Byzantine period. She is also a member of the Finnish team publishing the carbonized papyrus dossier from Petra, Jordan.
She received a Postdoctoral Researcher Grant from the Academy of Finland for the period 2012-2015 for her project SEMATIA: Linguistic Annotation of the Greek Documentary Papyri – Detecting and Determining Contact-Induced, Dialectal and Stylistic Variation. The aim of the project is to build a new digital tool enabling a wide variety of linguistic studies on the rich text corpus of administrative as well as everyday language used in the papyri, offering a needed parallel to the ancient literary material. In the first phase, the annotation will be developed and tested only with certain restricted dossiers. On a larger scale, the goal is to expand the annotation to the whole papyrological corpus. Dr. Vierros is spending the first year of this project as a Visiting Research Scholar at ISAW.