New York University

New York University

Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

Roger Bagnall
Director
Professor of Ancient History
roger.bagnall@nyu.edu
Curriculum Vitae
List of Publications

Before joining the NYU faculty in 2007, Bagnall was Jay Professor of Greek and Latin and Professor of History at Columbia University, where he had taught for 33 years. During that time he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Chair of the Department of Classics. Educated at Yale University and the University of Toronto, he specializes in the social and economic history of Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique Egypt. He has held many leadership positions in the fields of classics and papyrology; he is co-founder of a six-university consortium creating the Advanced Papyrological Information System. Among his best-known works are Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993), The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994; with Bruce Frier), and Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History (1995). He has also edited many volumes of papyri and other ancient texts. He directs NYU-Columbia's joint excavation project at Amheida in the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Académie Royale de Belgique, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy.

 

Alexander Jones
Professor of the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity
Professor of Mathematics (Associated Faculty, Courant Institute)
alexander.jones@nyu.edu

Alexander Jones studied Classics at the University of British Columbia and the history of the ancient mathematical sciences in the Department of the History of Mathematics at Brown University. Before coming to NYU, he was for sixteen years on the faculty of the Department of Classics and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His work centers on the history and transmission of the mathematical sciences, especially astronomy.

He is the author of several editions of Greek scientific texts, among them Pappus of Alexandria's commentary on the corpus of Hellenistic geometrical treatises known as the "Treasury of Analysis"; an anonymous Byzantine astronomical handbook based on Islamic sources; and a collection of about two hundred fragmentary astronomical texts, tables, and horoscopes from the papyri excavated a century ago by Grenfell and Hunt at Oxyrhynchus. His current research interests include the contacts between Babylonian and Greco-Roman astronomy and astrology, the Antikythera Mechanism and other artifacts of Hellenistic astronomy, and the scientific work of Claudius Ptolemy. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and recipient of several awards and honors including a Guggenheim fellowship and the Francis Bacon Award in the History of Science.

 

Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Associate Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (from September, 2009)
List of Publications

Beate Pongratz-Leisten was trained as a translator and interpreter of French and Spanish at the École Supérieure des Interprètes et des Traducteurs, Paris, and the University of Mainz. In 1983 she embarked on a second career in ancient Near Eastern Studies, Egyptology, and Religious Studies at Tübingen University, where she received her doctorate and habilitation, and Harvard University. Before joining the faculty of ISAW she taught at Tübingen University and Freiburg University in Germany, as well as at Princeton, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton Theological Seminary.

Although her focus shifted from archaeological field work to the study of textual sources, the materialities of culture continue to inform her research in the intellectual, political and religious history of the Ancient Near East. Her major interest lies with the development of cultural strategies and key metaphors to sustain political structures as well as the scholars and textual communities involved in construing, transmitting and transforming the cultural discourse under ever-changing historical circumstances.

Her books on the cultic topography and ideological program of the New Year festival in Babylonia and Assyria (1994) and on the use of divination as knowledge of rulership with a focus on the cooperation between divinatory experts and the king as well as the presentation of the king's communication with the gods in the official inscriptions (1999) (list of publications).

Current research projects include a book on Cosmology and Kingship in Mesopotamia which investigates the cooperation between elites and the king in shaping the ideal image of the king. Another book is dedicated to The Shaping of the Divine and Divine Agency in Mesopotamia. In 2007 she organized an international conference on the topic Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism at Princeton University, the proceedings of which will be published by Eisenbrauns.

She is a member of the American Oriental Society, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft, Berlin and was awarded several fellowships including fellowships of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2000 and of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University in 2003/04. Recently she was awarded a NEH grant at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2007/08.

 

During its first few years, the Institute plans to recruit an additional five to ten members of the faculty. The following advertisement is appearing in a variety of venues in fall, 2007:

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University (ISAW), plans to make a number of faculty appointments during the coming several years. ISAW is a newly created, specially funded, cross-disciplinary institute for research and graduate education in the history, archaeology, and culture of the entire Old World, including Asia and Africa, from late prehistoric times to the eight century AD. The fields and rank of these appointments and the pace of hiring are open, but all appointments will be tenured or tenure-track. We seek individuals of scholarly distinction or promise in any relevant field whose work will benefit from freedom from departmental structures and the stimulation of working closely with colleagues in other disciplines, approaches, periods, or geographical areas and who are committed to helping develop the intellectual life of such a community. Applicants with a history of interdisciplinary exchange are particularly welcome. The Institute's initial faculty will be closely involved in creating its graduate program, which will emphasize individual supervision, and in building its library. The faculty will also be involved in choosing a group of visiting researchers each year.

Applications (letter, curriculum vitae, and list of referees) or nominations should be sent to Professor Roger S. Bagnall, Director, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th St., New York, NY 10028. Review of candidates will begin on November 1, 2007. Founded in 1831, New York University is the largest private university in the country, with 13 schools, 3 institutes, and nearly 40,000 students. New York University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.