Visiting Research Scholars 2009-2010
We are no longer accepting applications for the 2009-2010 Visiting Research Scholars program. If you wish to apply for the 2010-2011 Visiting Research Scholars program please refer to this page for details on applying to the program.
Nicola Aravecchia
Contact: arav0004@umn.edu
Nicola Aravecchia holds a BA in Classical Studies from the
University of Bologna, an MA in Ancient and Medieval Art
& Archaeology and a PhD in Art History both from the
University of Minnesota. His interests lie in Early Christian
art and architecture in Egypt, particularly in the development
of architectural forms in religious and monastic architecture.
He also studies the use of space in Early Christian monasteries.
He published an essay on methods of space syntax analysis
applied to plans of Egyptian monastic cells. He is the field
director of the archaeological mission of Ain el-Gedida, a
fourth-century settlement in the Dakhla Oasis of Upper Egypt.
During his year at ISAW, Nicola will develop an online gazetteer
of Early Christian sites and monuments in Egypt, which will be
integrated within the framework of Pleiades (a joint project of
ISAW, the AWMC Ancient World Mapping Center, and the Stoa
Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities). He
will also work toward the publication of the final report of the
2006-2008 excavations at Ain el-Gedida.
Muriel Debié
Contact: muriel.debie@irht.cnrs.fr
Muriel Debié studied
classics at the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris. She
fell into Syriac by chance, thanks to her interest in a Syriac
text, the so-called Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodios, that was
translated almost immediately into Greek and Latin, and then
into all the old European languages, and circulated in Russia
until the 18th century. Since then she has kept her hand in with
Syriac by teaching it (first at the Ecole normale supérieure and
then at the Catholic University of Paris), whilst simultaneously
maintaining an active interest in Greek and other Eastern
Christian literature. For her PhD (Paris IV-Sorbonne) she
specialized in the history of historical writing. Since 2000 she
has held a permanent research position in the National Centre
for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, in the Institute for
Textual Research and History (IRHT). She is currently finishing
a monograph on Syriac Historiography entitled (in French):
Writing History in Syriac: Intercultural Transmissions and
Identity Formation between Hellenism and Islam. She is a
founding member of the Société d'études syriaques (Society for
Syriac Studies) that organizes an international meeting every
year on a specific topic of Syriac Studies, which is then
published as a guide to the subject. The 6th volume, edited by
Muriel, is-surprise, surprise!-dedicated to Syriac
Historiography. At ISAW Muriel will be working collaboratively
on a monograph on multilingualism and diglossia in the Late
Antique Near East.
David Klotz
Contact: dmk12@nyu.edu
David Klotz received his Ph.D. in
Egyptology from Yale University in 2008. His research interests
include Egyptian religion and history during the Persian,
Ptolemaic and Roman periods, times of particularly vibrant
intercultural discourse between indigenous Egyptians and their
foreign rulers. His first monograph ("Adoration of the Ram,"
2006) studied lengthy hymns to the god Amun-Re from the Persian
Period temple of Hibis in Khargeh Oasis. David now leads
excavations at the Roman Period temple of Nadura, across the
road from Hibis and dedicated to the lunar god, Chonsu. While at
ISAW, David is also adapting his dissertation for publication,
"Egyptian Temple Construction and Theology in Roman Period
Thebes." This study demonstrates that the Pharaonic capital of
Thebes remained a vibrant religious center well into the Roman
Period, and also attempts to disentangle the complex theology of
Amun, the Ogdoad, and over forty other divinities from the
Theban nome. At the same time, David is publishing several
previously neglected Late Period autobiographical inscriptions
from private statues in museums in the United States and Europe.
Damián Fernández
Contact: dmfernan@princeton.edu
Damián Fernández completed
his undergraduate studies in Buenos Aires, Argentina (Licenciado
in History) and later pursued his graduate studies in North
America (MA in Religious Studies, UBC, Canada and PhD in
History, Princeton University). He is particularly interested in
economic and social history of the ancient world, from both
theoretical and empirical perspectives. His current field of
research focuses on late antique Iberia and the social and
economic transformations occurring in the Atlantic areas of the
peninsula between the late empire and the rise of the Visigothic
kingdom. He studies the aristocratic economic and social
strategies vis-à-vis the changing forms of state from the
archaeological and literary evidence. His research project at
ISAW involves the study of the Atlantic regions of western
Europe and north Africa between the late third century and the
dissolution of imperial authority in the fifth century.
Xiaoli Ouyang
Contact: xouyang@post.harvard.edu
Xiaoli Ouyang received
her PhD in Akkadian and Sumerian Studies (generally known as
Mesopotamian Studies) in the Department of Near Eastern
Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, March 2009.
Thanks to her BS in economics, she is broadly interested in
economic developments and administrative structures of ancient
societies. Her dissertation focuses on Umma, an archeological
site in Mesopotamia that dates to the Ur III period (c.
2100-2000 BCE) and has yielded close to 30,000 texts written in
cuneiform on clay tablets. In her dissertation, she tracks the
movements of silver in the Umma province as a way to reconstruct
the provincial administrative hierarchy and understand its
interaction with the crown. She also identifies the important
role played by the merchants in helping the Umma government
dispose of staple goods to obtain silver. Her project at ISAW
targets the temple treasuries in Umma. She plans to investigate
the source of and control over the Umma temple treasuries, which
often feature luxury items such as gems and precious metals not
indigenous to Mesopotamia. Using the temple treasuries as a
lens, she hopes to gain insight into the operation of the temple
households in Umma vis-à-vis their de facto control by the
governor or the king. She will also compare Umma with other Ur
III provinces in terms of gubernatorial influence over temple
households in order to reveal the checks and balances between
local powers and the central government during the Ur III
period.
Darrel Rutkin
Contact: drutkin2001@yahoo.com
H. Darrel Rutkin received
his B.A. in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin and
an M.A. in Classics from Stanford University. Switching from
ancient philosophy to the history of astrology as a part of the
history of science, he earned a PhD in the Department of History
and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. Although his
research focuses primarily on the history of astrology as a part
of Western natural knowledge ca. 1250-1800, his research at
I.S.A.W. will return to astrology's roots in antiquity, focusing
primarily on astrology's configuration within the divinatory
disciplines as articulated in Cicero's De divinatione.
Caroline Sauvage
Contact: caroline.sauvage@mom.fr
Caroline Sauvage received
her Ph.D. (2006) in Archaeology of the Ancient World at Lyon 2
University (France). Her research interests include trade and
maritime exchanges in the eastern Mediterranean during the Late
Bronze Age and early Iron Age. Her Ph.D. and post-doctoral
research (2007-2008 University of California at Berkeley) both
focus on exchanges, the status of objects and their
representations in the eastern Mediterranean area as a whole.
Her work is based on the study of material artifacts and their
interconnections, and aims to avoid the classic pitfalls of
disciplinary partitioning in the study of eastern Mediterranean
societies and group identities. During her stay at ISAW,
Caroline will focus on two projects. The first will investigate
the status of boats in the eastern Mediterranean and aims to
explore, through representations, textual evidence and
shipwrecks, the social significance of how boats were viewed by
the Late Bronze Age peoples. The second project, funded by a
Shelby White - Leon Levy grant for archaeological publication
(2008-2011), concerns the publication of the material excavated
by C.F.A. Schaeffer at Minet el-Beida and Ugarit during the
first years of work there. This material is preserved in the
archaeological museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris.
Oleksandr Symonenko
Contact: simonal@i.com.ua
Oleksandr Symonenko received his Ph.D. and Doctor of Archaeology
degrees from the Institute of Archaeology of Ukrainian National
Academy of Sciences in Kiev, has been elected a Corresponding
Member of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin. His
research interests lie, broadly, in the areas of archaeology and
history of Sarmatians and he is currently completing a book
about Sarmatian invasion into North Pontic region in the mid-1st
cent. AD. As a field archaeologist he is a well-known expert in
the barrow excavation and has spent 25 campaigns in Ukraine,
Russia, and Hungary. His special academic interest is the origin
of Sarmatians in the light of a new discoveries and revision of
known artifacts and theories. During his stay in ISAW he will
pursue his research on the Inner Asia antiquities and, in
particular, explore the idea of the origination of ruling
Sarmatian clan Alans from the people of Pazyryk culture who
lived for a long period in the Hsiung-nu milieu close to China.
David G.K. Taylor
Contact: david.taylor@orinst.ox.ac.uk
David Taylor is the
university lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac at the University of
Oxford and a fellow of Wolfson College, where he attempts to
persuade colleagues and students that their life will remain
sadly incomplete without at least some knowledge of the delights
of the 3000-year-old Aramaic culture. His primary research
interests are in Syriac language, history, and literature, and
in language contact in the Late Antique Near East. Whilst at
ISAW he will be working on a monograph on multilingualism and
diglossia in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia, and finishing
some volumes on sixth-century Syriac psalm exegesis. Other
recently completed research includes papers on desire and
devotion in thirteenth-century Syriac wine songs, the formation
of sixth-century Syrian Orthodox identity, Christ as levitical
priest in early Syriac thought, a textual examination of the
Syriac sources relating to the martyrs of Najran, and
post-sixteenth-century European attempts to suppress or
manipulate Syriac in Kerala.
Wu Xin
Contact: wuxinphl@gmail.com
Wu Xin received her Ph.D in
Ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology from the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Also with a training in Chinese
archaeology, Wu Xin has developed a broad interest in the issues
of cultural interactions across the extensive geographic area
between China and eastern Mediterranean world, especially the
social and political relations between the Persians, Central
Asians and the steppe nomads during the Achaemenid Persian
period (between the 6th and 4th centuries AD). Wu Xin is
currently preparing a book that is derived from her dissertation
"Central Asian in the Context of the Achaemenid Persian Empire".
She is also working on a project intending to elucidate the
early cultural exchanges between Central Asia and China (ca. 5th
to 2nd centuries BC).
Mantha Zarmakoupi
Contact: mz52@nyu.edu
Mantha
Zarmakoupi received her MSt and DPhil in Classical Archaeology
from Oxford University. Prior to this she studied Architectural
Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and
gained a Master of Design Studies in History and Theory from
Harvard University. Her research in archaeology is informed by
her background in architectural practice, history and theory of
architecture as well as by digital visualizations. Her doctoral
thesis examined the architecture of Roman luxury villas around
the Bay of Naples (c. 1st c. BCE to 79 CE) to address the
cultural factors that informed it - she is currently preparing
this work for publication. She has also developed a VR digital
model of the Villa of the Papyri that systematizes and
visualizes data from past and ongoing archaeological fieldwork
at the Villa. This year, Mantha is starting work on a new
project on the urban growth of late Hellenistic Delos. This
project focuses on one of the new neighborhoods of late
Hellenistic Delos, the "Quartier du Stade," in order to examine
the rapid urbanization resulting from the economic development
of the island after 167 BCE.
