Visiting Research Scholars 2008-2009

Mikheil Abramishvili
Contact: mikho@archaeologist.com
Born and educated in Tbilisi (Georgia) Mikheil Abramishvili has been the director of the Tbilisi Archaeological Museum (now part of the Georgian National Museum) for the last 20 years. Apart from his full time involvement in practical archaeology excavating sites in Tbilisi, ranging from the Bronze Age to the Medieval period, Mikheil Abramishvili's research interests comprise the development of ancient metallurgy, trade relations and religious beliefs in the Old World. As a Fulbright scholar at ISAW, he will be focusing on the Bronze Age relations between the South Caucasus, the Near East and the Aegean. These cross-cultural issues have been partially addressed during his scholarship visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2005-06), the German Archaeological Institute departments in Berlin (2006) and Athens (2005), and the University of Oxford (1996). Although his current work is mainly based on archaeological evidence, it also integrates religious studies, mythology, historical records and comparative linguistics.

Lindsay Allen
Contact: Lindsay.Allen@kcl.ac.uk
Lindsay Allen is lecturer in Greek and Near Eastern history at King's College London. She received her BA in Classics from the University of Oxford and her MA and PhD in Near Eastern history from the University of London. Her research and teaching focus on pre-Islamic, particularly Achaemenid Iran and related topics (ranging from Alexander of Macedon in Asia to the early modern European 'discovery' of Persepolis). She has also become interested in broader, interconnected issues concerning the writing of imperial histories in the post-colonial era; most recently she has examined concepts of foreign and national antiquity in twentieth-century British children's literature.

At ISAW, she is adapting her doctoral thesis into the book, "Through the King's Gate: Images and reflections of Achaemenid Kingship"; she argues that a range of textual and material evidence shows an adaptive dialogue across cultures, between king and both subject and non-subject populations, about royal legitimacy and identity between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. She is also pursuing ongoing research into the shaping of Persepolis as an archaeological site through survey and excavation in the 1920s and 30s; the project 'At Home at Persepolis' looks specifically at the phenomenon of the reconstructed palace (or so-called harem) of Xerxes as an archaeologist's residence and museum at the heart of the site.

Ari Bryen
Contact: azbryen@gmail.com
Ari Bryen holds a BA from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MA and PhD from the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. His interests are in Greco-Roman social history, and especially in ancient legal practice. Before coming to ISAW, Bryen wrote a dissertation on violence in Roman and Late Antique Egypt which examined petitions on papyrus as a way of asking how non-elite individuals understood their roles in their communities, and how they conceptualized the responsibilities of their government to them in a time of crisis. This year Bryen is starting work on two new projects: one is what will hopefully be a book-length study of local legal cultures in the Greek-speaking provinces of the Roman empire. The other project is a collaborative venture that seeks to compare processes of culture-contact and acculturation in ancient and modern empires.

Tamara Chin
Contact: tchin@uchicago.edu
Tamara Chin is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She trained in Greek, Latin and classical Chinese literatures (Harvard BA Classics and Literature 1997; UC Berkeley PhD Comparative Literature 2005) and she is currently completing a book on the impact of Han dynasty imperial expansion on Chinese literary form. It explores notions of the foreign in representations of peoples, objects and intercultural exchange, and focuses on the problem of reading dissent and difference within the archive. Her research interests also include comparative ethnographic and geographic literature, and the late nineteenth and twentieth century development and circulation of the idea of the ancient Silk Road.

Valeriya Kozlovskaya
Contact: lera123@verizon.net
Valeriya Kozlovskaya received her PhD in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College. Her research interests lie, broadly, in the areas of maritime archaeology, ancient trade, Greek colonization, and geoarchaeology. Her particular interest is the field to which some scholars refer now as the new thalassology. This newly-developed area of ancient studies encompasses a broad variety of sea-related topics beyond the traditional ones of ship-building, navigation, shipwrecks, piracy, and navies. As a field archaeologist, she participated in a number of projects in Greece and Turkey; the archaeological project in which she is currently involved is the excavation of the ancient Greek colony of Tanais near the modern city of Rostov-on-Don in Russia. During her stay at ISAW she will pursue her research on the Black Sea and, in particular, explore the idea of Pontic unity in antiquity from a maritime perspective.

Scott J. McDonough
Contact: mcdonoughs21@wpunj.edu | sjm15@nyu.edu
Scott McDonough is an assistant professor of History at the William Paterson University of New Jersey. He received his training at Cornell University (B.A. Classics, B.A. History, 1996) and the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D. History, 2005). His research interests lay in the social, institutional and religious history of late ancient west Asia, especially pre-Islamic Iran. During his year at ISAW he will be working on a monograph, "'We Pray for Our Glorious King': Power, Patronage and Piety in Sasanian Iran, 220-651 CE." This study examines the interactions of kings, Iranian "great families" and "outsider" elites, such as Christian bishops, through historical writing, hagiography, epistolography, epigraphy and material culture. In this Sasanian material may be seen the origins of the enduring institutions of centralized governance, communal identity and royal patronage of the medieval Near East.

Maya B. Muratov
Contact: maya.muratov@nyu.edu
Maya B. Muratov received her BA in Ancient History from the Moscow State University and her MA and PhD in Ancient Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her research interests include cultural, religious, and social history of the Greek colonies in the Northern Black Sea area and interactions between the colonists and the indigenous populations. These interests are reflected in her fieldwork: for the past 18 years Maya has been participating in the excavation of Pantikapaion, the ancient capital of the Bosporan Kingdom. She is also involved in research projects dealing with the Iron Age archaeology of the Eurasian Steppes; indigenous art and archaeology on the territories north of the Alps; theater culture and popular entertainment in the Ancient Mediterranean and along the Silk Road; marionette theater in Antiquity and in Middle Ages. While at the ISAW, in addition to pursuing her own research, Maya is also acting as a guest curator for one of the future exhibitions dealing with the cultural identity of the Bosporan Kingdom.

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.

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).

Alice Yao
Contact: yaoalice@hotmail.com
Alice Yao is an anthropological archaeologist who received her training from the University of Chicago (B.A. Anthropology 1999) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. Anthropology 2008). Alice worked on archaeology projects in northern China before becoming drawn to ancient China's frontier with mainland Southeast Asia and the rise of indigenous Bronze Age polities during the first millennium BCE. Her dissertation work focused on the impact of Han Empire's conquest of the region and sought to explain the variable ways different communities and social classes responded to this momentous change in local history. Looking even further into the past, Alice will conduct an archaeological survey of the Lake Dian Basin that aims to recover the settlement sites of these local communities prior to Han contact.

Yuval Yekutieli
Contact: yuvaly@bgu.ac.il
Yuval Yekutieli is a senior lecturer at the Department of Bible, Archaeology and Ancient Near East at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Beer-Sheva, Israel). His research interests encompass issues such as ancient colonialism, the archaeology of slavery and bonded labor, proto-urbanism, arid-zone archaeology, ancient pastoralism, landscape archaeology, operation of power in antiquity, and international relations during the Southern Levantine Bronze Age (3,700 - 1,200 BC). His current research projects include archaeological survey in the southern Judean Desert; social aspects of ancient copper mining in the 'Arava rift valley; investigations of early connections between Canaan, Egypt and Transjordan; and colonialism in the southern Levant during the Early Bronze Age. At ISAW his aim is to explore the dynamics through which 'global' networks interacted with the population of the Dead Sea - 'Arava rift valley (The current border area between the modern states of Israel and Jordan) during the Bronze Age (3700 - 1200 BC). This research will draw upon previously collected data from both his ongoing work in the region, and other researchers' published studies. This objective would be achieved through the analysis of three types of archaeological remains from the region - rock-art, architecture and pottery, and their interaction with the local landscape.