Rate My Professor Shawn Ross

Shawn Ross, FRSN, FSA, is Professor of History and Archaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, where he previously served as Director of Digitally Enabled Research and currently holds the position of Director, Strategic Initiatives, Digitally Enabled Research. He earned a BA in History from Whitman College in 1993, an MA in History from the University of Washington in 1996, and a PhD in History from the University of Washington in 2001, with a dissertation titled 'Gaia, Ethnos, Demos: Land, Leadership, and Community in Early Archaic Greece.' After completing his doctorate, Ross taught for four years at William Paterson University in New Jersey. He joined the University of New South Wales in 2005 as a Lecturer, advancing to Associate Professor and Deputy Head of School in the School of Humanities and Languages by 2014. In 2015, he moved to Macquarie University with joint appointments in the Departments of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, and Ancient History.

Ross specializes in digital archaeology, the history and archaeology of pre-Classical Greece, oral tradition as history focusing on Homer and Hesiod, archaeology of the Balkans particularly Thrace, and the application of information technology to research. He has co-supervised the Tundzha Regional Archaeological Project since 2008 and directed the Field Acquired Information Management Systems project from 2012, developing open-source mobile tools for fieldwork that led to the spin-out of Electronic Field Notebooks Pty Ltd in 2024. Notable publications include 'Barbarophonos: Language and Panhellenism in the Iliad' (Classical Philology, 2005), 'Environmental conditions in the SE Balkans since the Last Glacial Maximum and their influence on the spread of agriculture into Europe' (Quaternary Science Reviews, 2013), the edited volume 'The Tundzha Regional Archaeological Project: Surface Survey, Palaeoecology, and Associated Studies in Central and Southeast Bulgaria, 2009-2015' (2018), and 'Early contact between late farming and pastoralist societies in southeastern Europe' (Nature, 2023). Ross received the DataApp Prize Competition award in 2018 and a Faculty of Arts Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in 2019. Since July 2022, he has been on secondment to the Australian Research Data Commons, managing the National Information Infrastructure product portfolio including Research Data Australia and PID Services.