Ancient Near Eastern Studies

Zainab Bahrani is Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at Columbia University. Professor Bahrani is the author and editor of twelve books, including Women of Babylon (London: Routledge, 2001) Rituals of War: the body and violence in Mesopotamia (New York: Zone Books, 2008) which was awarded the James Henry Breasted Book Prize by the American Historical Association for the best book in any field of history prior to 1000 CE, The Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity (Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, 2014), based on her 2010-2011 Slade Lecture in the Fine Arts at Oxford, which won the Lionel Trilling Book prize. She writes on the status and meaning of images and of art in general, addressing both ancient and modern philosophies of representation. Her other areas of interest include intellectual history, antiquarianism, and the politics of art and archaeology. Another aspect of Bahrani’s work has been in the area of monument preservation, conservation and the politics of cultural heritage. Since 2003, Bahrani has also written widely on the destruction of the cultural heritage of Iraq in the popular press, in publications such as The Nation, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal. 

Salam Al Kuntar is Lecturing Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Rutgers New-Brunswick’s Department of Classics and Assistant Dean of Middle Eastern Affairs at Rutgers Global. She worked at the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) in Syria in a number of capacities from 1996-2012. Since 2012, she has been active in the field of cultural heritage preservation. Salam is a National Geographic explorer, a consulting scholar at the Penn Museum and the chair of SIMAT (Syrians for Heritage), a non-profit association for heritage preservation based in Berlin. Her research interests center on the archaeology and heritage of the Middle East exploring a wide variety of themes such as ancient economy and urbanism, forced migration, modern identity and historic narratives, conflict and iconoclasm. She has worked on heritage preservation projects with displaced communities and refugees in Turkey, Jordan and in northwest Syria.