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 university lecturer in archaeology.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Docent Emanuel Pfoh (he/him) is an historical anthropologist focusing on the region of the southern Levant during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages.
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.
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 Assistant Professor Politics, religions, and cultures of the empires of 1st millennium Mesopotamia.