Visiting Research Scholars 2007-2008

To apply for a visiting research scholar position, fill in the online application located here (deadline: December 1st, 2007)

Roderick B. Campbell
Contact: rbc2@nyu.edu
Over the last 15 or so years, while itinerantly living in Taiwan and China, Rod Campbell earned a B.A. from the University of Victoria in English and Chinese literature, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia in Ancient Chinese paleography and linguistics (oracle-bones and bronze inscriptions) and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Anthropology and East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His dissertation synthesized epigraphic, archaeological and classical textual sources and focused on kinship and violence in the production of the Late Shang (ca. 1250-1050 B.C.) world order. This work was simultaneously an attempt to de-link the narrative of early Chinese civilization from teleologies of rationality and reductionist evolutionism while exploring a socio-phenomenological approach to historical change. Rod's current research interests include the social archaeology of Bronze-Age Chinese houses, villages and communities, a comparative and deep historic exploration of the relationships between changing forms of violence (physical, structural, symbolic etc.), socio-political organization, and being-in-the-world, and the development of a "networks and boundaries" approach to the diachronic study of socio-political entities.

Sabine R. Hübner
Contact: sh2403@columbia.edu
Sabine R. Hübner (Ph.D. Jena 2005) studied History and Classics in Münster, Rome, Berlin, Jena, London, Berkeley and New York. She has held fellowships and grants by the DFG, the DAAD, the European Erasmus Programme, the DAI, the Thyssen Foundation, and the European Union. Her interests include the social history of the Graeco-Roman East, Greek epigraphy, papyrology, and early Christianity. She has published among others on the clergy in the society of the Later Roman Empire (Der Klerus in der Gesellschaft des spätantiken Kleinasiens, Stuttgart 2005), on old age in Classical Greece, on Greek epigraphy of Asia Minor, on growing up fatherless in the ancient world, and on brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt. Currently she is working on a broader project on intergenerational relationships in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, drawing on comparative studies on household forms and family networks in other patriarchal pre-modern societies which exhibit a similar demographic regime and followed comparable marriage and household formation patterns, like e.g. late medieval Tuscany and pre-modern China, Japan and Taiwan.

Jinyu Liu
Contact: jliu@depauw.edu
Born and raised in China, she obtained her B.A. (1993) and M.A. (1996) from Nanjing University, China, where she studied Greek and Roman history, as well as Chinese history and literature. She then did graduate work at Columbia University, receiving a Ph.D. in ancient history in 2004. Since then, she has been teaching as assistant professor of Classical Studies at DePauw University. Her research interest is in Roman history, with a special emphasis on social history, Latin epigraphy, and acculturation. Her current project studies the associations of the textile workers and traders (collegia centonariorum) in the Roman Empire. She is also working on a long-term book project with Duckworth that documents the translation and reception of Graeco-Roman Classics in China.

Rachel Mairs
Contact: rachel.mairs@googlemail.com
Rachel Mairs' research interests lie, broadly, in cultural and ethnic contact in the Hellenistic world, with special reference to Central Asia and to Egypt. After a B.A. Hons. in Oriental Studies at the University of Cambridge (2002), in which her primary specialisation was in the various phases of the Egyptian language, she earned her M.Phil. (2003) and Ph.D. (2006) from the Faculty of Classics at the same institution. Whilst maintaining her Egyptian interests, especially in the edition of Greek and Demotic texts on papyri, her research has increasingly concentrated on the Greek colonial presence in Central Asia in the period after Alexander. Her Ph.D. thesis, on 'Ethnic Identity in the Hellenistic Far East', attempted to bring current sociological theory on the construction and articulation of ethnic identity to a case study where the archaeological and epigraphic evidence is notoriously problematic. Current research interests include language contact and transmission in the Hellenistic world.

Anne Porter
Contact: amporter@usc.edu
Educated at the universities of Melbourne and Chicago, and now an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California with a triple appointment in the School of Religion, and departments of Classics and Art History, Anne Porter is an archaeologist who employs widely-ranging sources, theories and methods in her work on the societies of the ancient Near East from the fourth to second millennium BCE. While she has published works on a variety of specific topics, such as chronology, state formation and mortuary practices, she considers these but facets of her primary task: to try and understand the experience of being Mesopotamian. She was recently a Visiting Professor at the Collège de France, where she lectured on the outcomes of fragmentation and dispersal among mobile populations for Near Eastern history.

Giovanni Ruffini
Contact: grr919@gmail.com
Giovanni Ruffini's current research interests include the Roman world in late antiquity and its contemporary Nubian and Ethiopian civilizations. During his year at ISAW he will be revising his dissertation, Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), and preparing a prosopography of the Byzantine village of Aphrodito. Future research projects include a prosopographical study of Nubian land sales and an analysis of the Ethiopic inheritance of Greco-Roman historiography. Giovanni has just completed a year as a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University, where he taught The Roman World in Late Antiquity and The Early Christian Church. He received an A.B. in European history from the University of Chicago, an M.A. in the history of Europe before 1500 from San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University.

Kevin van Bladel
Contact: vanblade@usc.edu
Kevin van Bladel received his Ph.D. in Graeco-Arabic Studies at Yale University in 2004 and is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California. His research investigates learned traditions in different language communities from the Mediterranean to Inner Asia, focusing on Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Latin, Persian, and Sanskrit, and in particular, on translations of scientific texts between these languages. He has published articles on the medieval pseudo-Aristotle, Qur'anic cosmology, and the Alexander legend in Arabic tradition. Forthcoming works include a study of the role of early Islamic Bactrian culture in the transmission of texts from Sanskrit into Arabic, and the first book-length treatment of the Arabic Hermetica. In the fall of 2007 he will be a member in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where he will research the origins of Arabic chronography, before coming to ISAW for three semesters.