NMC welcomes Dr. Laura Hare as Assistant Professor of Biblical Hebrew Language and Dr. Lynn Welton as Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology.
Dr. Hare joined NMC's faculty on July 1, 2021. She completed her PhD in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at the University of Toronto in 2018. Dr. Hare is a scholar of Biblical Hebrew language and linguistics. She is particularly interested in the sociolinguistics of gender and class in the Hebrew Bible. Her work on gendered speech in biblical narrative was featured on the CBC radio program Ideas.
She also has an interest in gender and sexuality in ancient Israel and is especially interested in the biblical stories that feature women using their sexuality to their own advantage and that of their community. At NMC, she will teach Biblical Hebrew language and courses on the Hebrew Bible.
Dr. Welton received her PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of Toronto, and has twenty years of field experience, having worked in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and Ethiopia. Geographically, she focuses primarily on the Levant and Anatolia, especially on the Late Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, having published extensively on materials from the Amuq Plain in southern Turkey as part of her long-term involvement with the Tayinat Archaeological Project.
Her recent work as part of the Computational Research on the Ancient Near East (CRANE) Project reconstructs human-environment interaction using a combination of climate modelling and agent-based modelling to evaluate agricultural strategies and decision-making as responses to climate change, in addition to ongoing research into agricultural productivity and land use in the ancient Near East. During her recently completed Marie Curie fellowship at Durham University, she used isotopic analysis of animal skeletal remains to investigate the role of pastoral mobility in the rise of complex societies in the Jordan Valley and western Syria during the 5th-3rd millennia BCE. In NMC, she will teach courses in Near Eastern archaeology.