Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Ancient Near East
- Assyriology
Areas of Interest
- Babylonia and Assyria in the first millennium BC
- Babylonian Urbanism
- Mesopotamian social and economic history
- Integration of textual and archaeological data
- Digital cuneiform
Biography
My work focuses on the social, political and economic history and material culture of 1st millennium BC Mesopotamia, with a particular interest in Babylonian urbanism and the built environment, and in the Neo-Assyrian royal household. As an Assyriologist who has also trained in archaeology and gained considerable experience of Near Eastern excavation, my primary interest is in combining textual information and material culture in the study of Mesopotamian society and economy. I apply this approach to the study of the Babylonian city and to investigating house and household.I also have an interest in Digital Humanities and have recently (2017–2019) served as PI of an international project, Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages (MTAAC), funded by SSHRC through Round 4 of the Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging into Data Challenge.
Education
Publications
- Reconstructing Ancient Babylon: Myth and Reality ( : 2022)
- The Later Phases of Southern Mesopotamian Urbanism: Babylonia in the Second and First Millennia BC ( : 2022)
- Babylon (Oxford University Press, New York : 2021)
- Management of Resources in Mesopotamia: the View from the First Millennium BC (Charles University, Prague : 2020)
- Building Babylon: The Anatomy of a Monumental Construction Project. (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York : 2019)
- Neo-Assyrian Specialists. Crafts, Offices, and Other Professional Designations. (Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project and Finnish Foundation for Assyriological Research, Helsinki : 2017)
- Slavery and Personhood in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. (Wiley-Blackwell : 2017)
- Urban craftsmen and other specialists, their land holdings, and the Neo-Assyrian state (Oxbow Books, Oxford : 2016)
- "I burnt, razed (and) destroyed those cities": the Assyrian accounts of deliberate architectural destruction. (Routledge, London and New York : 2015)
- Family structure, household cycle and the social use of domestic space in urban Babylonia. (The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago : 2015)
- Documentary Sources in Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman Economic History: Methodology and Practice. (Oxbow Books, Oxford and Philadelphia : 2014)
- House size and household structure: quantitative data in the study of Babylonian urban living conditions. (Oxbow Books, Oxford and Havertown : 2014)
- The Babylonian cities: investigating urban morphology using texts and archaeology. (Brill, Leiden : 2014)
- Temple and city in Hellenistic Uruk: sacred space and the transformation of Late Babylonian society. (Brepols, Turnhout : 2014)