Research Interests
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. I also have an interest in Digital Humanities: I currently lead a project on the Machine Translation of Sumerian and am preparing two digital text corpora for the ORACC (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus) platform. My research and publications cover the following topics:
- urbanism and the built environment
- house and household
- religious architecture
- integration of textual and archaeological data
- Hellenistic Babylonia (especially the city of Uruk)
- the Assyrian royal palace and household
- onomastics and naming practices
- prosopography
- slavery
- society and economy
- political history
- cuneiform archives and archival practices
- Digital Humanities
Work in Progress
- Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages project (MTAAC), funded through the Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging Into Data Challenge (2017–2019)
- Nappahu: Digital Corpus of Neo-Babylonian Texts from the Nappahu Archive (an ORACC project)
- PNAo: Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire Online — corrections and additions to The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (an ORACC project)
- Digital Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (database in progress)
- Digital corpus of Neo- and Late Babylonian texts concerning the urban landscape (an ORACC project)
- The Urban Landscape in First Millennium BC Babylonia (monograph)
- “The Assyrian Empire: the Inner View” — chapter for the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East (OUP)
- “Assyrian Names” — chapter for textbook Guide to Personal Names in Cuneiform Texts from Babylonia (c. 750–100 BCE)
- “Nabonidus” — short article for The Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (De Gruyter)
- “Nabopolassar” — short article for The Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (De Gruyter)