Adrienne Mayor

In 2018–19, she was a Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, her research dedicated to the impulse to create artificial life, whether that be today's artificial intelligence or the animated statues of myth. The fruits of this research are contained in her latest book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology.

From 2009 to 2015, Mayor maintained a Facebook profile under the name Mithradates Eupator, which became an active network for more than 2,500 people, including international scholars, classicists, archaeologists, linguists, ancient historians, authors, novelists, museum curators, and others who engaged in valuable research and educational conversation. This unique crowd-sourcing site was eliminated by Facebook on May 26, 2015.

Mayor's first book, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, investigated discoveries and interpretations of dinosaur and other large vertebrate fossils in classical antiquity, and proposed that ancient observations of the fossilized remains of mammoths, mastodons, dinosaurs, and other extinct species influenced belief in giants, heroes, the griffin and some other fabulous beings of myth and legend. This book is the basis for the popular History Channel show "Ancient Monster Hunters" and the BBC show Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters and several museum exhibits. A National Geographic children's book by Marc Aronson, The Griffin and the Dinosaur (2014) describes Mayor's hypothesis that ancient observations of Protoceratops dinosaur fossils influenced ancient images and tales of Griffins.

From 2011 to 2017, Mayor was a regular contributor to the history of science website Wonders and Marvels.

Her books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, Italian, Russian, and Greek and have been featured in documentaries on the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC. She has lectured at the American Museum of Natural History, Boston Museum of Fine Art, Smithsonian, Art Institute of Chicago, Getty Museum, among other venues, and has been interviewed on NPR, BBC, and Coast to Coast AM. Her biography of Mithradates VI Eupator, The Poison King, was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award 2009.

In her fourth book, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy, Mayor details the story of the life of Mithradates, leader of the ancient Black Sea kingdom of Pontus, who, in the 1st century B.C., did everything he could to overthrow the Roman Republic. The book attempts to relay events from the Pontic point of view, as opposed to the Roman point of view. The Poison King was one of five nonfiction finalists in the National Book Awards, 2009, and has been translated into Italian, German, Russian, Turkish, and Spanish.

Since 2006, Mayor has been a research scholar in the Classics Department and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Stanford University.

Jasmin W. Cyril writes in Kadin/Woman 2000 that “any reader or researcher will be well rewarded through a perusal of this monograph and will find immeasurable advantage in the notes and bibliography.” In American Journal of Philology, classicist Alison Keith criticizes Mayor's tendency to make unsubstantiated assertions, treat folklore as fact, and neglect context for some sources; Keith feels that the book is “rich in research but weak in accepted methods of scholarship.” In New Statesman classics professor Edith Hall, King's College London, says the book is more than "an important contribution to ancient history," opening "up new horizons in world storytelling and feminist iconography [with] rigorous scholarship and poetic charm." By "painstaking research into the literature, folklore and ancient traditions of the myriad peoples between Greece, Russia and China, especially the Kyrgyz, the Azerbaijanis and the Circassians of Caucasia, she has broken down the often impenetrable walls dividing western cultural history from its eastern equivalents."

From 1980 to 1996, she worked as a copy editor, and printmaker.

Adrienne Mayor (born 1946) is a historian of ancient science and a classical folklorist.