Philippa M. Steele is a Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Faculty of Classics and a Senior Research Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Following the award of a large European Research Council grant, she is the Principal Investigator and Director of the major five-year project Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS), managing a research team investigating writing in the ancient Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean and Levant. She has been the author and editor of a number of books and articles ranging over topics from ancient Cypriot language and culture to the historical study of the Mycenaean world and methodological approaches to the study of writing systems and ancient literacy. She held the Evans-Pritchard Lectureship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2014 and in 2015 she began a series of conferences devoted to ancient writing, 'Understanding Relations between Scripts'. She is currently working on the development of the Aegean syllabic scripts (including Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A and B) and the early Greek alphabet.