Saana Svärd (she/her) is professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Helsinki, the former director of the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (2018-2025) and the PI of the project “Embodied Emotions: Ancient Mesopotamia and Today” (2022-2026). Most of her work has focused on the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the study of gender in Mesopotamia. On a more general level, she is interested in methodological and theoretical advances for the study of the ancient Near East. In her published work, she has adapted and developed approaches from gender studies, social sciences, digital humanities, language technology and history of emotions to gain new perspectives on cuneiform sources.
Jason Silverman's (he/him) is professor of Ancient Near Eastern history and culture. His expertise lies in the impact of the Persian Empire on Judaean communities (i.e., inhabitants of Judah in modern southern Israel/Palestine).
Antti Lahelma (he/him) is a University Lecturer in archaeology. A specialist in Finnish prehistory, world rock art, and the archaeology of Jordan, his research interests also include classical Graeco-Roman traditions and theoretical archaeology. His recent books include an edited volume based on ANEE's archaeological field work in Jordan, titled "Social Complexity in Northern Jordan" (Bloomsbury, 2026) and an exploration of the less rational aspects of early complex societies, titled "Weirding Civilization: The Strange Foundations of the Modern World" (with Vesa-Pekka Herva; Routledge, 2025).
Chana Algarvio (she/her) is a doctoral researcher at the University of Toronto focusing on Egyptian iconographic influence in the material culture of the Achaemenid Empire. Her dissertation aims to demonstrate the multi-material and multifaceted nature of Persian comprehension of Egyptian culture and ideologies, and the interconnected art networks that fostered such. As an art historian, Chana has a general interest in the cross-cultural influence of Egyptian art in Western Asia and the depiction of foreigners in Egyptian art. Moreover, she is a Rare Book Librarian at Massey College, possessing further interests in non-Western manuscript cultures, material philology, and the archaeology of the book.
Dr. Tero Alstola (he/him) is a scholar of ancient Near Eastern cultures and languages, specializing in digital humanities and the social history of Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. His research projects focus on migrant and rural population in Babylonian society, network approaches to historical datasets, and language technological study of the Akkadian language.
Kaisa Autere (she/her) is a researcher of Egyptian social history and philology and a former member of the ANEE Team 1. She is currently finishing her PhD thesis about the dependency relationships among the temple officials in the late Middle Kingdom settlement and temple site of Lahun (1850-1700 BC). She focuses on socio-economic history and social organisation of Middle Kingdom Egypt, epistolography and Historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Within Egyptology, her current interests include patronage relationships, households, hidden labour and poverty. She holds a MA degree in Archaeology and is a member of the UH based research group Helsinki Open Archaeology and Digital Humanities (HOARD) with a focus on university pedagogy.
Avneri Meir, Rotem Yale University
Rotem Avneri Meir (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Associate in Ancient Judaism at the Jewish Studies Program at Yale. His work centers on the social history of the Persian, Hellenistic, and early Roman Levant, focusing on aspects of imperial control and administration, local authority, and elite agency.
Dr Ellie Bennett (she/her) is an Assyriologist interested in emotions and gender identity during the Neo-Assyrian period (c. 934-612 BCE).
Thomas R. Blanton IV's interdisciplinary research focuses on Paul of Tarsus, early Christianity in Roman economic contexts, and the “religions” of the ancient Mediterranean region more broadly. His recent publications include Imitating Abraham: Ritual and Exemplarity in Jewish and Christian Contexts (Brill, 2025), coedited with Claudia D. Bergmann; and “Reading Religion Economically,” Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations, Jan. 6, 2026:
Rick Bonnie (he/him) is a University Lecturer in Museology in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki, where he teaches on museum history, collection work, and community engagement, among other things. His research interests include museum and heritage ethics, object biographies, decolonisation and provenance issues, museum collection histories, and sensory archaeology.
Patricia Bou Pérez’s (she/her) Humboldt project examines masculinities in Mesopotamia and Syria during the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000-1600 BCE). Focusing on letters, scholar, and legal texts, it analyzes how masculinities were prescribed, performed, and negotiated in both professional and familial contexts, with particular attention to non-elite men. Moving beyond hegemonic masculinity models, the project will adapt and test a new analytical framework for studying masculinities through Old Babylonian texts that integrates sociological theory (Western and non-Western approaches) and philological analysis. By foregrounding everyday practices and regional variation, it seeks to refine our understanding of gendered identities and contribute to broader debates on masculinity in premodern societies.
Dr. Lucia Cerullo (she/her) (PhD, University of Naples “L'Orientale”) is an archaeologist and art historian specializing in first-millennium BCE Iran. She has extensive field experience in Italy, Iran, and Uzbekistan, focusing on Elamite and Achaemenid material culture and circulation. Her interdisciplinary research combines archaeology, Elamite epigraphy, historical analysis, and digital humanities. Currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, she works on the ERC project WORK-IT, investigating labor systems and temple economies in the Achaemenid Southern Levant through archaeological and digital approaches.
Hanan Charaf (she/her) is an archaeologist specializing in the Bronze and Iron Age Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean. Her research focuses on interregional interaction and cultural exchange, with particular emphasis on ceramic production and circulation. Charaf works on Bronze Age pottery from the Central Levant as well as on Cypriot pottery in Lebanon, using material culture to explore mobility, connectivity, and socio-economic dynamics. Her work combines archaeological, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches and is grounded in ethically informed heritage research and collaboration with local communities in the Middle East and North Africa.She directs the excavations at the Middle Bronze Age site of Tell Douris (in Lebanon). Charaf co-directs the Tell Beirut Conservation Project, and is in charge of the publications of the Tell Arqa excavations.
Petra M. Creamer (she/her / they/them) is an assistant professor at Emory University (USA) and an archaeologist of the ancient Near Eastern world researching the genesis and growth of empires and the impact of these empires on their subjects. She is director of the excavation project Rural Landscapes of Iron Age Imperial Mesopotamia, where her ongoing fieldwork addresses long-term settlement patterns and lifeways in the ancient Assyrian imperial core (c. 1350-600 BCE). She employs a variety of remote sensing applications (such as magnetometry and satellite/UAV imagery) to further understand the infrastructure and urbanism of the broader Assyrian landscape.
Walter Crist (he/him) is an archaeologist who has been an active researcher in the Ancient Near East since 2002. He has published on ancient Cyprus, Azerbaijan, and Egypt, and regularly publish on Near Eastern games. Crist is also the Vice Chair of the COST Action GameTable, which is exploring AI techniques for studying ancient games. He is interested in games as a social tool, and in how they can be examined to study social interaction, use of space, and the experience of time in the past, particularly focusing on ancient Near Eastern societies.
Benjamín Cutillas Victoria (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Prehistory Department at the Complutense University of Madrid. He received his PhD from the University of Murcia (2020) and is developing several lines of research focused on the architectural and settlement patterns of Mediterranean communities in Recent Prehistory, especially during the Bronze and Iron Ages, as well as the application of archaeometric techniques to analyse the production and consumption processes of ceramic goods and earthen architecture. His career has been marked by extensive international experience, having enjoyed research stays at the Universities of Bordeaux, Sheffield and Lisbon, and subsequently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki (2021) and the NCSR Demokritos in Athens (2022-2023).
Damsma, Alinda Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London
Dr Alinda Damsma (she/her) lectures ancient Semitic languages in the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies at UCL. She received her Bachelor and Master of Divinity from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (2003) and her PhD from the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL (2008). After her PhD she conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge and UCL. Before she re-joined UCL in 2019, she taught at King’s College London, Leo Baeck College, and the University of Oxford. Her current research projects focus on the use of Aramaic in kabbalistic writings and the role and impact of the Bible on the early modern witch-hunts. Her research interests are the Hebrew Bible, Bible translations, the ancient Near East and its languages, Egyptology, Jewish mysticism, and magic, divination, and witchcraft in biblical & post-biblical times.
Helen Dawson (she/her) is a prehistoric archaeologist specialising in the study of the Mediterranean islands. After leaving her native Sicily to study Mediterranean prehistory at Cambridge (MPhil 2000) and University College London (PhD 2005), she moved to Berlin in 2013 and joined the Topoi Excellence Cluster of the Freie Universität Berlin as a Marie Curie – COFUND Research Fellow (2013-2015) and as a Gerda Henkel scholar (2015-2019). Helen is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Prehistory, Early History and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Tübingen, where she is the scientific coordinator of the project: "Islands of Transformation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Adaptation, Sustainability, and Resilience."
Fink, Sebastian Universität Innsbruck
Sebastian Fink (he/him) is an Assyriologist. He is interested in the intellectual history of Mesopotamia, the ideology of kingship, the history of warfare in Mesopotamia, and Sumerian history and language. He has held positions in Innsbruck, Kassel, and Helsinki. Since 2020 he is Senior Scientist at the University of Innsbruck.
Halpern, Baruch, University of Georgia
Baruch Halpern’s (he/him) intrests are in ancient social and intellectual history in as many facets as possible.
Bianca Hand (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of California, Davis, specializing in ancient West Asian art and archaeology. Her research examines Neo-Assyrian visual and architectural culture, with particular emphasis on the role of alterity in the construction of imperial identity. Her current project focuses on Neo-Assyrian royal palatial complexes, analyzing how representations of human and non-human others shaped imperial ideology, memory, and spatial experience. She has conducted archaeological fieldwork and excavations in Cyprus, Turkey, and Iraq.
Dr Elisabeth Holmqvist-Sipilä's (she/her) (PhD UCL) expertise lies in archaeological science, and she has published widely on ancient artefact technologies and trade of ceramics and ceramic-borne goods in the southern Levant, especially focusing on Iron Age, Roman-Byzantine and early Islamic pottery.
Iakov Kadochnikov (he/him) is an Assyriologist primarily interested in the political and religious history of southern Mesopotamia, as well as in the literature of the late third and early second millennia BCE. He is particularly interested in the Sargonic dynasty. Kadochnikov’s previous research (Ph.D thesis) has focused on the introduction of the explicitly stated divine status of the king under Naram-Sin of Akkade and on the subsequent development of this idea in later periods, especially during the Ur III and Isin I dynasties. He is currently also researching narratives within the literary tradition concerning the Sargonic kings and their later development.
Dr Doga Karakaya (he/him) is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki in the ”Building in New Lands” project. He is specialized in the archaeobotanical research of Bronze and Iron Age societies with a focus on ancient plant macro-remains and phytoliths. His main research interest is to explore the ways through which complex societies manage their agricultural resources, the potential anthropogenic impact of the Bronze Age societies on the environment, and agricultural decision-making during the climatic and political instabilities in the Southwest Asia.
Anu Karoliina Ketonen (she/her) works as a doctoral researcher in Archaelogy at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests are in material culture and in her doctoral thesis Ketonen is studying Hellenistic pottery from the sanctuary of Artemis Lykoatis in Arcadia, Greece.
King, Rhyne, University of Toronto
Rhyne King is a historian of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which stretched from the eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia from 550 to 330 BCE. His first book, published with the University of California press in 2025, is called “The House of the Satrap: The Making of the Ancient Persian Empire.” Satraps were the regional representatives of the Persian king, and they considered the people and property under their control as a “house.” He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and is currently a Faculty of Arts & Science Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto.
Aleksandra Kubiak-Schneider (she/her) is a Greek and Aramaic epigraphist, focused on the religions of Near East in Roman imperial period. Her expertise is Palmyra and Hatra. She is also interested in the social and economic aspects of religions and temple work.
Heidi Jauhiainen (she/her) has a background in Egyptology, where her interests lie in local religion and everyday life. After defending her PhD in 2009 in the University of Helsinki on "Feasts and Festivals at Deir el-Medina," Jauhiainen earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Already during these studies, Jauhiainen worked on a project identifying and harvesting webpages written in Finno-Ugric languages. Since then, she has worked on identifying semantic domains in Akkadian Texts and on machine-readable hieroglyphic texts and tools to produce them. Jauhiainen is a researcher in the “Automatic Classification and Analysis of Texts from Egyptian Antiquity” project.
Tommi Jauhiainen (he/him) is an Academy Research Fellow at the Department of Digital Humanities of the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on automatic language identification and the application of NLP methods to historical and ancient texts, including cuneiform and Egyptian sources. He is the project leader of the “Automatic Classification and Analysis of Texts from Egyptian Antiquity” and the “Unseen Languages in Language Identification”. He has organized several shared tasks in language identification, including Cuneiform Language Identification in 2019, and is the first author of around 20 peer-reviewed publications in this field.
Christopher Jones (he/him) is a historian specializing in the study of the Neo-Assyrian empire. His current projects include using social network analysis to understand late Assyrian politics (under contract with SBL press), archaeological and metallurgical studies of long-distance trade in the Neo-Assyrian period, and a long-term goal of writing an environmental history of the Near East during the Iron Age.
Lauri Laine (he/him) is a doctoral researcher working upon the topic of Cultural Evolution of Divinity Conceptualizations in Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. His research interests focus on religion (both as a phenomenon and its representations in the ancient Near East), cognitive and cultural evolutionary approaches to religion, historiography, and archaeology. He is also a high school teacher of religion and history, because of which pedagogy is always close to his heart. Moreover, He is a freelancer photographer specializing in academic photography.
Li, Yunhao, Yale University
Yunhao Li (he/him) is a PhD student in Assyriology at Yale University. His research focuses on the commercial activities and organizational arrangements of Old Assyrian merchants. He also has a strong interest in social history, particularly the study of childhood in ANE.
Dr Krister Lindén (he/him) is Research Director of Language Technology at the Department for Digital Humanities of the University of Helsinki. Lindén has directed a number of research projects funded by the Research Council of Finland, e.g. the Origins of Emesal, and has been Vice-Team Leader of Team1 at the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires. In addition to having developed software for processing resources for various languages, he has published more than 190 peer-reviewed scientific publications. Current research interests extend beyond language processing to social, material, and semantic network research.
Dr Marta Lorenzon (she/her) is an archaeologist specializing in the Mediterranean and Asia, with a focus on the materiality of ancient built environments and the interactions between communities, landscapes, and climate. Her research integrates archaeological, geoarchaeological, and environmental approaches to explore how architectural practices, mobility, and resource availability shaped past societies. Lorenzon is particularly interested in how people adapted to environmental change and how material choices reflect social, technological, and cultural dynamics. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and aims to connect archaeological data with broader comparative and theoretical frameworks.
Mizzoni, Alejandro, Universidad de Buenos Aires
Alejandro Mizzoni (he/him) is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires. His dissertation adresses the impacts of warfare on the local politics of Iron Age Syria between the end of the Late Bronze Age and the Assyrian conquest of the area (ca. 1150-700 BCE) from a historical-anthropological point of view. He is also interested in a wide range interconnections between Upper Mesopotamia and the Northen Levant in the Iron Age, including symbolic and socio-linguistic aspects. He also works as an editor of the Revista del Instituto de Historia Antigua Oriental.
Matthew Ong (he/him) works primarily in digital assyriology and applications of cognitive linguistics to conceptual history of Mesopotamia. Part of this means working on new digital tools for corpus research as well as linguistic corpus annotation. It also involves thinking about conceptual metaphors and how better to understand linguistic constructions found in the Sumerian/Akkadian texts.
Peecher, Andrew, Princeton Theological Seminary
Andrew Peecher’s (he/him) work explores cross-cultural and material perspectives on the Hebrew Bible and ASWA religions of the second and first millennia BCE, with particular attention to the effect of material conditions on religious experience. His dissertation argues that cities (among other topographic phenomena) function as divine images in the Hebrew Bible and in surrounding ASWA religions.
Docent Emanuel Pfoh (he/him) is an historical anthropologist focusing on the region of the southern Levant during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages.
Alessandro Piccolo (he/him) is a researcher trained in Classical Philology and Egyptology, specialising in cultural and economic interactions between Egypt and the Aegean from the third millennium BCE to the age of Alexander the Great. His current work focuses on ancient economies, with particular attention to theoretical and methodological questions. Piccolo applies the surplus approach of classical economic theory (from Adam Smith to Piero Sraffa) to the study of the Pharaonic economy and the economic relations between the Aegean world and Egypt, especially during the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664–526 BCE).
Sanchez Morquecho, Miguel, University of California, San Diego
Miguel Sanchez Morquecho (he/him) is a Doctoral Candidate at UCSD, where he is finishing his dissertation on diplomatic messengers in the ancient Mediterranean. In his project, Sanchez Morquecho explores the diplomatic and international relations among the polities of the ancient Mediterranean, from the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the eight century B.C. to the Roman Republic and Greek poleis of the second century B.C. He argues that an analysis from the perspective of the messengers shows the existence of a shared Mediterranean diplomatic culture despite the messengers’ and their communities’ diverse societal traditions. Communities adhered to this diplomatic culture composed of common customs such as messengers’ qualifications, hospitality, the curation of topographies and monuments to facilitate interactions, to foment trust and aid the transmission of messages to each other.
Mitchka Shahryari’s (she/her) research focuses on the imperial administration of the Achaemenid Empire, with a particular emphasis on the Aramaic corpus particularly from Idumea. By examining documents related to fiscality, land tenure, economy, and labour in the southern Levant, she investigates how local practices interacted with broader imperial structures. Shahryari’s work aims to reconstruct the administrative mechanisms through which the Achaemenid state governed its provinces and managed resources, offering new insights into the dynamics between central authority and regional communities.
Dr. Stefan L. Smith (PhD, University of Durham) is a specialist in GIS and landscape archaeology of the Ancient Near East, with a focus on human subsistence in climatically marginal regions, interactions between nomadic and sedentarist populations, and modern methods of field documentation. Since his PhD (2016), he has occupied various postdoctoral positions in Jordan, Belgium, Finland, and Germany, and since 2015 co-directs the "Western Harra Survey" in the north-eastern desert of Jordan, a fieldwork project dedicated to documenting the region's prehistoric populations. Since 2022, he has expanded his research into the Iraqi Western Desert as part of a collaborative project supported by local universities.
Daniele Soares (she/her) is a doctoral researcher associated with the WORK-IT project and pursuing her doctoral dissertation on “Rebuilding Jerusalem’s Temple: Work and Taxation in Ezra-Nehemiah.” This research aims to analyze the ritual practices, offerings, social dynamics, and trade as depicted in the biblical text of Ezra-Nehemiah, providing insights into the community’s interaction during the Achaemenid period.
Stefanović, Danijela, University of Belgrade / Faculty of Philosophy
Danijela Stefanović (she/her) is an Egyptologist whose research focuses on Egypt and the ancient Near East, with particular emphasis on social and administrative structures of the Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period. Her work combines prosopography, microhistory, and historical network analysis to reconstruct elite, bureaucratic, and kinship networks from textual and archaeological sources. She is especially interested in methodological questions at the intersection of Egyptology, Assyriology, and digital humanities, and in integrating Egyptological evidence into broader comparative studies of ancient Near Eastern societies.
Alexander Steiner (he/him) is a PhD Candidate of Ancient History and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Innsbruck. From October 2024 to September 2026, he carries out his work on his dissertation within a Fellowship by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research interests are language contact and spatial perception in antiquity. In his dissertation “Conceptual Metaphors for Sumerian and Akkadian Absolute Direction Terms in Comparison” he explores the conceptual origins of cardinal direction terms in Sumerian and Akkadian as metaphors.
Tadmor, Eli, independent scholar
Dr. Eli Tadmor (he/him) is a scholar of the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, and specialize in the thematic, structural, and philological analysis of and literary and historical texts composed in Akkadian and of their broader political, religious, intertextual, and social contexts.
Dr. Lena Tambs (she/her) (PhD, University of Cologne) is an Egyptologist specialised in the Ptolemaic period (332-30 BCE) of ancient Egyptian history. In ANEE and ANEE+, she engages in interdisciplinary research, applying relational theories and formal methods of network analysis to the study of ancient texts and material culture. Keywords: Ptolemaic Empire; ancient archives; correspondences; documentary sources; Greek; Demotic; papyri; ostraca; wooden tablets; Network Science; Social Network Analysis; social and economic theories, network theories; entanglement theory; social history; Egypt; Pathyris; the Fayum; Philadelphia; the Levant; Egyptology; Ancient Near Eastern Studies; Classics.
Töyräänvuori (she/her) has studied 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. This era is interesting because it has left a wealth of written and material evidence, and especially because it preceded the almost complete collapse of this cooperative world order at the turn of the Bronze and Iron Ages.
Repekka Uotila (she/her) is an Assyriologist focusing on first millennium BCE Assyria. Her research interests include bilingualism, ancient bureaucracy, and scribal education. Her PhD dissertation "Parallel use of Akkadian and Aramaic in Neo-Assyrian archives" addresses the functions of the two languages (Aramaic and Akkadian) and scripts (alphabetic and cuneiform) in ancient archival practices.
Melis Uzdurum (she/her) is an archaeologist specializing in earthen architecture, micromorphology, and the socio-ecological analysis of ancient built environments in Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean. Combining field archaeology with laboratory-based geoarchaeological approaches, her work investigates construction technologies, maintenance practices, and material recycling across periods from the Neolithic to Late Antiquity. She applies thin-section analysis, multi-proxy methods, and the TRASH (Tracing Recycling and Sustainability Heritage) framework to explore how communities engaged with resources and shaped their architectural landscapes. Her research integrates micro- and macro-scale evidence to understand long-term social and environmental dynamics.
Jonathan Valk (he/him) is a distinguished researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid, where he is the Principal Investigator of the ARAMAIZATION ERC project (2025-2030). Valk is a historian of the ancient Middle East specializing in the history of Assyria in the first and second millennia BCE. He is the author of the book Ancient Assyrians: Identity and Society in Antiquity and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and co-editor of Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction in Comparative Perspective (New York University Press, 2021). He has published widely on different subjects in various journals and edited volumes.
Caroline Wallis (she/her) has explored various topics in the historical anthropology of Ancient Empires in recent years. Her main research examines the links between socio-economic phenomena and ritual practice and religious belief in the first millennium BCE. Using a Bourdieusian framework, she studies how agro-pastoral activity and taxation practices relate to imperial rituals and broader structures of power. Wallis focuses in particular on New Year rituals in the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian Achaemenid Empires.
Melanie Wasmuth (she/her) is a socio-cultural historian specializing in cross-regional mobility and cultural contact in the Mediterranean and West Asian area of connectivity (c. 1000–300 BCE). Wasmuth’s research is located at the intersection of material and textual culture with special focus on integrating visual, stratigraphic, material, and textual data via analytical lenses taken from culture theoretical approaches. Her university teaching comprises ancient transcultural history, Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology from the 4th–1st mill. BCE. Wasmuth also loves to share her expertise and enthusiasm beyond academia via public lectures, hands-on workshops, and school interventions for children, teenagers, and adults.
Zaia, Shana, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Shana Zaia (she/her) is an Assyriologist specializing in the politics, religions, and cultures of Mesopotamian empires in the 1st millennium BCE, with a particular focus on the Neo-Assyrian Empire. She is a tenured Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the VU Amsterdam, where she teaches in the Department of Art & Culture, History, and Antiquity and in the Amsterdam Centre for Ancient Studies and Archaeology, a joint program with the University of Amsterdam. Her publications and further information are available on shanazaia.com.
Zisa, Gioele, Sapienza University of Rome and University of Pennsylvania
Gioele Zisa (he/him) is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Pennsylvania. His project, PlANET (Plants in the Ancient Near Eastern Texts), investigates human-plant relationships in 1st millennium BCE Mesopotamia. He holds a PhD in Assyriology from LMU Munich, publishing The Loss of Male Sexual Desire in Ancient Mesopotamia (De Gruyter, 2021), and a second PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Palermo. He also directs the projects GREEN and BioANE, studying gardens and biodiversity in the ancient Near East. His research also investigates masculinities, the use of analogical reasoning in ancient medicine, and Sumerian mythology, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies, and Environmental Humanities.