Leila A. Amineddoleh

amineddoleh

With a decade and a half of experience in both litigation and transactional law, Leila A. Amineddoleh is an expert in the field of art and cultural heritage law. She represents major art collectors, museums, galleries, dealers, non-profits, artists, estates, foundations and foreign governments. She has been involved in matters related to multi-million dollar contractual disputes, international cultural heritage law violations, the recovery of stolen art and antiquities, complex fraud schemes, authentication disputes, art-backed loans, and the purchase and sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of art and collectibles.

Amr Al Azm

Amr Al Azm is Professor of Middle East History and Anthropology at Shawnee State University and currently teaches in the Gulf Studies Program at Qatar University. He was educated in the UK, reading Archaeology of Western Asiatics at the University of London, Institute of Archaeology. His doctoral degree was awarded in 1991. Dr. Al Azm’s experience is varied. He has excavated a number of sites, including Tell Hamoukar in Syria and one possibly associated with Ghengis Khan’s final resting place in Mongolia. He also served as the Director of Scientific and Conservation Laboratories at the General Department of Antiquities and Museums (1999-2004) and Head of the Centre for Archaeological Research at the University of Damascus (2003-2006). He has taught at the University of Damascus (1999-2006) and served as Dean of University Requirements at the Arab European University (2005-2006). Additionally, he is a keen observer of Middle East events, particularly in Syria and its neighbors.

Camille Angelo

Camille Angelo is currently a doctoral candidate at Yale University in the Department of Religious Studies. Her work examines the body and sexuality in late antique Christian cultural discourse using an interdisciplinary approach drawn from art history, archaeology, social history, and gender and sexuality studies. Currently, she is analyzing the archaeological remains of several early Christian sites in the eastern Mediterranean to elucidate patterns of ritual movement and embodied worship in late antiquity. Camille is a field archaeologist and has excavated in the eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus.  In 2018, she launched the Late Antiquity Modeling Project (LAMP), a digital humanities collective dedicated to creating three-dimensional reconstructions of late antique ritual spaces. The same year, Camille received a grant from the DigitalGlobe Foundation and was appointed to the Society of Biblical Literature’s Graduate Student Advisory Board. She is also a graduate associate at the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale University.

Jennifer A. Baird

Jen Baird is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research has focussed on the site of Dura-Europos, including extensive work in Yale University Art Gallery’s Dura archive and archaeological fieldwork at Dura before the start of the Syrian conflict. That work centered initially on the many preserved houses of the site, the topic of her PhD and first monograph (The Inner Lives of Ancient Houses, Oxford University Press, 2014). She has also written on a range of topics related to Dura, including archaeological photography and ancient graffiti. Among her recent publications are Dura-Europos (Bloomsbury, 2018), and a co-edited special issue of The Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies entitled Remembering Roman Syria.

Henry Colburn

Henry Colburn is adjunct faculty at New York University and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Dr. Colburn earned his Ph.D. in classical art and archaeology from the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the art and archaeology of ancient Iran and on the regions of the Near East, Eastern Mediterranean, and Central Asia that interacted with Iran prior to the advent of Islam. His first book on this subject, Archaeology of Empire in Achaemenid Egypt, was published in 2019. He has held fellowships at the Bard Graduate Center, Harvard Art Museums, the Getty Research Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and taught at the University of California, Irvine; the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Riverside. He is also a research associate of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan by virtue of his ongoing work on the seals of the Persepolis Fortification Archive. His current project is to create a new edition of Mikhail Rostovtzeff’s 1935 essay Dura and the Problem of Parthian Art.

Lucinda Dirven

Lucinda Dirven is a Professor of Antique Religions at Radboud University. She earned degrees in Art History and Theology from Leiden University in 1990 and 1992, respectively. In 1999, she obtained her Ph.D. at Leiden University with her dissertation ‘The Palmyrenes of Dura-Europos. A Case Study of Religious Interaction in Roman Syria’. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam and as an assistant professor in the history departments at both Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam. She has published on a variety of topics related to antique religions, especially during the Hellenistic and Roman periods in Syria and Iraq (Palmyra, Dura-Europos, Hatra) and the Roman West (especially the cult of Mithras). Her focus is on transitory periods, such as the transition from the traditional Mesopotamian and Egyptian to the ‘global’ Graeco-Roman world and the transition from a religious pluralistic world to a Christian world.

Jaś Elsner

Jaś Elsner works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium including into modernity. He has strong interests in comparativism, global art history and the critical historiography of the discipline. He is Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford University and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in late antiquity, at the British Museum from 2013 to 2018. He has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at Chicago since 2003, and since 2014 also at the Divinity School. Since 2009 he has been an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He is currently a member of the overseeing committee of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He was trained in Cambridge, Harvard, and London, before working at the Courtauld Institute and then Oxford.

Elizabeth M. Greene

Beth Greene is currently Canada Research Chair in Roman Archaeology and Associate Professor of Classics at University of Western Ontario. Her research focus is on Roman Provincial material culture and history, with a specialty in the Roman military and the role of women, children and families in frontier military communities. She excavates at the Roman fort at Vindolanda with the The Vindolanda Trust (since 2002) and has worked in Italy on Roman and Etruscan sites and elsewhere in Britain on Hadrian’s Wall. She is co-director of Western’s Vindolanda Field school, as well as the principal investigator for the Vindolanda Archaeological Leather Project.

Craig Harvey

Craig Harvey is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He received his Ph.D. from the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan in 2020. He is a Roman provincial archaeologist focusing on the interplay between imperialism and the environment, particularly as it is manifested though building materials and techniques. His research also extends to the formation of identity along the Roman frontiers, with particular interest in the economic and cultural relations between the Roman military and indigenous communities. Craig’s previous research and archaeological field work has largely centred on the Roman East and especially in Jordan, where he is associate director of the Humayma Excavation Project.

Simon T. James

Simon James is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester. He read archaeology at the London Institute of Archaeology, where he also took his Ph.D., by which time the Institute had become part of University College, London. He moved to the British Museum, first as an archaeological illustrator and then as a museum educator, responsible for programs relating to the later prehistoric and Roman collections. After a decade at the British Museum, he decided to seek a career in research and teaching. Having held a Leverhulme Special Research Fellowship at the University of Durham, he joined the University of Leicester School of Archaeology & Ancient History in January 2000. He was promoted Senior Lecturer in 2002, Reader in 2005 and Professor in 2012. He is currently Director of the Ancient Akrotiri Project, Cyprus, while also continuing research on the Hellenistic-, Parthian- and Roman-era Syrian city of Dura-Europos, its Roman garrison, and its exploration since 1920.

Ted Kaizer

Ted Kaiser

Ted Kaizer is a Professor of Roman Culture and History in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. He was educated at Leiden (MA, 1995) and Brasenose College, Oxford (DPhil, 2000), and held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (2002-2005) before coming to Durham. His main research interest is the social and religious history of the Near East in the Late Hellenistic and Roman period. He is the author of The Religious Life of Palmyra (Stuttgart, 2002) and has written articles on various aspects of religion and history of the Classical Levant. He is the editor of Blackwell’s forthcoming Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. His present research project concerns a study of the social patterns of worship at Dura-Europos, and in this context he has also produced the historiographical introductions to two volumes in the Bibliotheca Cumontiana for the Academia Belgica in Rome.

Rubina Raja

rubina-Raja

Rubina Raja is professor of classical archaeology at Aarhus University, and director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s centre of excellence Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet). She heads several further collective research projects: Archive Archaeology, the Palmyra Portrait Project, as well as Circular Economy and Urban Sustainability in Antiquity. Recently, her project Ceramics in Context, came to an end after four years of intense research and publications. She was co-PI of the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ (2012–2017). Raja is an experienced fieldwork archaeologist and co-directs fieldwork projects in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, most prominently the Danish-Italian Caesar’s Forum Project, as well as the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project. Raja’s research focuses on urban and landscape archaeology, on sites and their multiple networks from the Hellenistic to the medieval periods as attested through empirical evidence and sources. She is also an expert on iconography and portrait traditions in the Roman world as well as religious life in Antiquity – all topics on which she has published extensively. While being a classical archaeologist, she also works in the fields intersecting traditional archaeology and natural sciences, bringing high-definition studies of the past to the forefront – an approach, which has most prominently been pioneered through the work done within the framework of UrbNet.

Karen B. Stern Gabbay

Karen Stern Gabbay is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College. She conducts research across disciplines of archaeology, history, and religion, and teaches courses on Mediterranean cultural history and material culture of Jews in the Greek and Roman worlds. She has conducted field research throughout the Mediterranean and has excavated in Petra (Jordan), Sepphoris (Israel), and ancient Pylos and the Athenian Agora (Greece). Having taught at Dartmouth College, USC and Brown University, she served as a research fellow of the NEH, Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (Jerusalem), Getty Villa and Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. She has been invited to speak at universities including Tel Aviv University, Boston University, Oxford University, Columbia University and Bard Graduate Center. Her recent book with Princeton University Press considers ancient graffiti and daily lives of Jewish populations in late antiquity; the Daily Beast, Atlas Obscura, NPR, Guardian, Ha’aretz, and Chinese CCTV have featured her work.

Kevin van Bladel

Kevin Van Bladel

Kevin T. van Bladel is a Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Yale University. A philologist and historian, he studies texts and societies of the Near East of the period 200-1200 with special attention to the history of scholarship, the transition from Persian to Arab rule, and historical sociolinguistics. His research focuses on the interaction of different language communities and the translation of learned traditions between Arabic, Iranian languages, Aramaic, Greek, and Sanskrit. He is the author of The Arabic Hermes, which investigates the figure Hermes Trismegistus in its Arabic reception and transformation, showing how the ancient Egyptian sage of legend came to be considered a prophet by medieval Muslims, and From Sasanian Mandaeans to Sabians of the Marshes, which sheds light on the early history of the Mandaean religion and its origins in Sasanian Iraq. Among his published articles there are studies of Qur’anic cosmology, the history of the eighth-century Arabic translations of Sanskrit texts commissioned by Bactrian patrons, Zoroastrian Middle Persian lore in Arabic reception, language shift and conversion in the wake of the Islamic conquests, and other subjects.

Sitta von Reden

Sitta Von Reden

Sitta von Reden is Chair of Ancient History and Dean of Studies at the University of Freiburg. Her research and teaching focuses on ancient World History, economic history, Hellenistic Egypt, and the political culture of Greece from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. She has published widely on the monetary history of the ancient world, on comparative economic history and economic ethics of classical and Hellenistic antiquity. She is currently running an interdisciplinary research project on the comparative history of ancient empires. This project, Beyond the Silk Road. Economic Development, Frontier Zones and Inter-Imperiality in the Afro-Eurasian World Region, 300 BCE to 300 CE, is funded by the European Research Council. Since 2011, she has been involved in various other collaborative research projects such as the Collaborative Research Group (SFB) “Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms”. Between 2017-2019, she was co-Principle Investigator of the numismatic project HisMün, which was funded within the framework of the state initiative “Kleine Fächer” in support of minor or ancillary historical disciplines. She is also leading the tri-national teaching project “Connecting – Editing – Programming – Learning: Sowing the Seeds for Joint Teaching and Research in Digital Papyrology, Philology and Ancient History in the European Campus” (CEPL). In addition to her teaching activities at the Department of Ancient History, she teaches at the University College Freiburg, and in the Master’s programme Interdisciplinary Anthropology. In 2012-2016 she was deputy chairperson of the Association of Historians in Germany and since 2016 its treasurer.