Martti Nissinen (born 1959 in Kuopio, Finland) is Doctor of Theology (1992) and Professor of Old Testament studies at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Theology (2007–). He was the leader of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence “Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions” (2014–19). Earlier, Nissinen has served the University of Helsinki as Professor of Bible and the Ancient Near East (2002–2007), as research fellow of the Academy of Finland (1994–2002), and as Assistant Professor of Old Testament studies (1985–1994). He also served as translator of the Finnish Bible Translation Commission for two years in the late 1980’s, and as the leader of the Finnish Doctoral Programme of Theology in 2009–14.
Nissinen is known as an expert of the prophetic phenomenon in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, and his research interests include also gender issues (love poetry, homoeroticism, masculinity) in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean. His books include Prophetic Divination: Essays in Ancient Near Eastern Prophecy (2019), Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical and Greek Perspectives (2017), Prophets and Prophecy in the Ancient Near East (2nd ed. 2019), Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (1998), References to Prophecy in Neo-Assyrian Sources (1998), and Prophetie, Redaktion und Fortschreibung im Hoseabuch (Diss., 1991). He has edited several volumes and published a significant number of articles on topics related to prophecy, gender, and history of ancient Near Eastern religion.
Nissinen was member of the Institute of Advanced Study in 2008–9 and 2016, visitor in 2011, and member in 2016. He has lectured in ca. 40 European and North American universities and has several positions of trust in academic communities, for example, Society of Biblical Literature, OTSEM network, and Finnish Exegetical Society. He is Honorary Member of the Society for Old Testament Study, member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, and the Inspector of the Savonian Student Nation. He was the President of the Foundation for the Finnish Institute in the Middle East 2010–21.
Kateryna Baulina is a PhD candidate at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine), specializing in Ancient Near Eastern imperial history. Her research, “The Evolution of the Titulary of Hephaestion as a Manifestation of the Syncretism of Ancient Near Eastern Political Traditions in the Empire of Alexander the Great,”explores the transformation of political ideology and titulature within the broader context of intercultural exchange between Macedonian and Near Eastern imperial models.
She holds both BA and MA degrees in Ancient History from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Kateryna is currently the only Ukrainian scholar specializing in Assyrian and Achaemenid imperial history, with particular expertise in court rituals, royal titulature, sacral kingship, and the ideological foundations of imperial power.
Her research focuses on the interaction between Mesopotamian, Persian, and Hellenistic political traditions, especially in relation to court ceremonial, sacralization of rulership, and imperial representation.
She is the author of the following scholarly works:
Valentina Alessia Beretta obtained her PhD in archaeology at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and University of Turin in November 2025 with a thesis titled “Le dieu Hermaphrodite du Bassin Oriental de la Méditerranée à la Campanie: iconographie, culte et adaptations”. Since 2025 she is a permanent member of the French archaeological mission at Deir el-Mounira (Kharga New Valley – Egypt and since 2021 she is a didactical operator at the Egyptian Museum in Turin. Her research concerns Hermaphroditus (iconography and cult) and the significance of divine androgyny associated with representations of ithyphallic female goddesses.
Patricia Bou Pérez earned her PhD in 2022, with a focus on the daily lives of soldiers during the Old Babylonian period. That same year, she was awarded a Margarita Salas postdoctoral contract at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), where she researched emotions and warfare in the Old Babylonian period. Since January 2026, she has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Freiburg (Germany), where she is conducting a project on masculinities in the Old Babylonian period. She has published diverse articles in different languages, specially on warfare, emotions, and masculinities, and has completed research multiple stays, such as at ANEE (Finland) in 2023 and at the Research Center for West Asian Civilisation at the University of Tsukuba (Japan) in 2025.
Jessie DeGrado is Assistant Professor of Ancient Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Assyria's Plunder: From Ancient Empire to Modern Loot. He is a historian of first-millennium Mesopotamian and the Levant with a focus on categories such as gender and empire. His work also explores how modern history and politics affect our reconstruction of the past, including the legacy of Orientalism and Christian hegemony in Assyriology.
Ben Dewar is a cultural historian of Mesopotamia during the late second and early first millennia BC. They received their PhD, on Representations of Rebellion in the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions, from the University of Birmingham in 2019 before working as an Associate Lecturer in Ancient Middle Eastern History at University College London. Currently, they are an Early Career Research Associate at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, where they are undertaking research into Assyrian constructions of and engagement with history within the built environment. Their research interests focus on the intersection of ancient conceptions of imaginative geography and history with political, moral, religious, and intellectual thought. They are also interested in narratological approaches to cuneiform texts, and in modern popular receptions of Mesopotamia, particularly in music.
Kelsie Ehalt (they/them) is a 5th year PhD student in the department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. Kelsie mostly works on 7th century BCE Akkadian ritual texts written by scholars working for the Neo-Assyrian empire, and thinks about concepts of magic, state power, gender, and animality.
Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme is professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Oslo. She is currently writing a monograph on hospitality in the Hebrew Bible, and she is co-author (with Søren Lorenzen) of The Body in the Hebrew Bible (Eisenbrauns, forthcoming in 2026). She loves doing research on the body and gender, and on key anthropological themes in the Hebrew Bible, such as gifts, food, and ritual.
Sara Järlemyr defended her Phd in May this year at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University in Sweden, where she focuses on Masculinity and the Hebrew Bible. Her work explores how failed masculinity is portrayed in the metaphors in the prophetic oracles, with particular attention to failed militarised masculinity.
Sara Järlemyr's current project on the feasting and drunk warriors is contributing to broader discussions on the masculine ideal of moderate consumption.
Kai Krause is research assistant to Joachim J. Krause at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Ruhr University Bochum. After studying Protestant theology in Tübingen, Jerusalem, and Munich, he is currently working on his doctoral dissertation on constructions of masculitity in the Book of Ezekiel.
Nikolaos Lazaridis is Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History at California State University, Sacramento.
He received his PhD from Oxford University and his doctoral dissertation, which was published by Brill Publishers in 2007, is titled Wisdom in loose form: The language of proverbs in Egyptian and Greek collections of the Hellenistic and Roman period. Since then, he has co-edited the proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Egyptologists and a volume in honor of Ioannis Lyritzis’s career, and has translated an anthology of ancient Greek texts. Moreover, he has authored more than 20 articles on ancient Egyptian language, literature, and epigraphy.
He is currently preparing two monographs: The art of ancient Egyptian storytelling: The making of characters in Egyptian narrative fiction and North Kharga Oasis-Darb Ain Amur Survey (the latter co-authored with S. Ikram and L.-A. Warden Anderson).
In 2007, he became the North Kharga Oasis-Darb Ain Amur Survey team’s chief epigrapher, exploring epigraphic evidence discovered in Egypt’s Westen Desert. Since last year, he has been serving as the head of the Zayan Archaeology team, which excavates the site of Qasr el-Zayan in the Kharga Oasis, Egypt.
Lucrezia Manganelli is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Philology at Freie Universität Berlin, working on the reception and transformation of the textual tradition of the Akkadian kings from Mesopotamia to Anatolia. She holds a BA in Classics and an MA in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Pavia, as well as a Master’s degree in Human Sciences from the University School for Advanced Studies IUSS, where she developed her interest in the application of modern methodologies, in particular narratology and affective studies, to ancient texts.
I am a historian specializing in Assyriology and ancient world history, with a focus on cross-cultural interactions in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. My research uses cuneiform sources to examine Egyptians living in Assyrian cities, especially Assur, and to reposition Assyrian history within global and Mediterranean perspectives. I also work on connecting Assyrian history with Phoenician-Punic history and on developing interdisciplinary, socially open approaches that link historical research with history education through collaboration between universities, schools, and civic communities.
Bio coming soon.
Morgan E. Moroney is Assistant Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She received her PhD in Egyptian Art and Archaeology from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include wine, adornment, and expressions of gender and identity across ancient Egyptian history. She also teaches in the Department of Art History at Hunter College as an associate adjunct professor.
Omar N'Shea is the Director of the International School for Foundation Studies at the University of Malta, where he also coordinates the Humanities Programme. His teaching spans courses on ancient Near Eastern art, literature, and history, as well as Akkadian. His research focuses on textual and visual cultures of the Neo-Assyrian period, examining empire through gender and queer methodologies. He serves on the community board of GeMANE.
Zachary M. Rubin earned his PhD in Assyriology from Brown University. From 2021 to 2023, he conducted research as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research holistically explores the evolution of religious and cultural traditions in ancient Mesopotamia, and the ways they were impacted by developments in the social and political landscape. He has published articles on the appropriation of Babylonian traditions in Assyrian elite circles, the emergence of Babylonian cultural hegemony in southern Mesopotamia, and the evolution of Babylonian collective memory. He is currently teaching as a professor of the liberal arts at Shanghai Xing Wei College.
Ishbel Russell is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She received her BA with Honours in Assyriology & Egyptology at the University of Cambridge and her MSt in Middle Eastern Studies (Assyriology) at the University of Oxford. Ishbel’s current research explores depictions of violent and non-normative sexuality in Sumerian literary texts. Ishbel is particularly interested in placing traditional philological approaches in dialogue with interventions from critical theory and literary studies. To this end, her dissertation consists of a new edition of the Sumerian text Enlil and Ninlil, alongside chapters considering its complex depiction of sexuality, agency, and literary affect.
Dr. Joanna Töyräänvuori (PhD, University of Helsinki) is a Docent of Ancient Near Eastern studies at the University of Helsinki and a Docent of Cultural History at the University of Turku, currently employed as a research fellow at the Finnish Institute in the Middle East. Töyräänvuori has researched the history, cultural heritage and literature of the ancient Near East, focusing in particular on the Late Bronze Age, when the eastern Mediterranean was dominated by an international trade and cooperation network formed by several highly developed civilizations. Töyräänvuori’s speciality is the language and culture of Ugarit, a major trading city in the Late Bronze Age and suffered complete destruction as the world system collapsed, disappearing completely from the map of the world.
Matheus Treuk is Professor of Archaeology of Antiquity at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). He holds a PhD in Social History from the Universidade de São Paulo, including a doctoral internship at the École Française de Rome (EFR). He also conducted postdoctoral research at the University of São Paulo and has been a visiting researcher at Sapienza Università di Roma. His work focuses on Ancient History and Archaeology, with particular emphasis on the Ancient Near East, Classical Antiquity, Persian Egypt, and the Achaemenid Empire. He is a member of the NEBE (Núcleo de Estudos Brasileiros de Egiptologia) and NEA research groups (Núcleo de Estudos da Antiguidade).