Notes on Contributors
Beatrice Baragli holds a Ph.D. in Assyriology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2019) and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her interests mainly concern ritual, religious and literary texts from the second and first millennium BCE. She currently works on Sumero-Akkadian bilingualism and especially on Late Sumerian from a grammatical and cultural perspective. She recently published Sonnengrüße. Die sumerischen Kiutu-Gebetsbeschwörungen at Brill (Ancient Magic and Divination 19).
Annika Cöster-Gilbert is a PhD candidate in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Göttingen. In her doctoral thesis, she is investigating mythical Erzählstoffe in Old Babylonian ershemmas about the god Dumuzi.
Bénédicte Cuperly completed her joint PhD in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Göttingen and at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2021. In her dissertation, she provides an updated edition of the Sumerian poem Innana’s Descent into the Netherworld, as well as a new interpretation of its content relying on hylistic analysis. She currently teaches ancient history at Le Mans University.
Ben Dewar is Associate Lecturer in Ancient Middle Eastern History at UCL. His research focuses on Mesopotamian historiography of the late second and early first millennia BCE, with a particular interest in the Assyrian Royal Inscriptions. His previous research has investigated subjects including Neo-Assyrian conceptions of alterity and violence (Iraq, Studia Orientalia Electronica), deviant spaces in Assyrian and Babylonian literary-historical texts (Avar), and the chronological and geographical structure of Assyrian royal inscriptions (Kaskal, State Archives of Assyria Bulletin).
Gösta Gabriel heads the independent junior research group Mythische Literaturwerke der altbabylonischen Zeit als wissenspraktische Artefakte, which is based at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the reconstruction of ancient discourses that can be reconstructed from narrative and hymnal texts from Mesopotamia. In addition, he is concerned with the history of religion, mythology, science, and cuneiform writing. Among other things, he published the first overall interpretation of the so-called Babylonian Epic of the Creation (enūma elis—Weg zu einer globalen Weltordnung). The publication of his new edition of the Sumerian King List is in preparation.
Alhena Gadotti is a Professor in the Department of History at Towson University, Maryland, USA, where she teaches classes on Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Mediterranean history. Her research focuses on Sumerian literature, representation of women in Sumerian literary documents and the Old Babylonian scribal curriculum. Her most recent monograph, Elementary Education in Early Second Millennium BCE Southern Babylonia, in collaboration with Dr. Alexandra Kleinerman, came out in late 2021.
Sophus Helle is a literary historian and translator. He specializes in the Babylonian epics, particularly Gilgamesh, and the works of the poet Enheduana, both of which he has translated into Danish and English. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Aarhus University (2020) and is a postdoctoral student at Freie Universität Berlin, and his research interests include narrative structure, the history and nature of philology, authorship, gender and sexuality, and the epic genre.
Gina Konstantopoulos is an assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California Los Angeles. Her research focuses on demons, religion, and magic in ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian and Akkadian literature, and the modern reception of the ancient Near East. Her monograph on the Sebettu-demons in Mesopotamia is under contract and forthcoming with Brill.
Robert Marineau completed his PhD in Hittitology from the University of Chicago in 2020, with a dissertation titled, “The Literary Effects of Discourse Patterns in Hittite Texts.” He is currently a post-doctoral researcher on an onomastics research project for Tyndale House, Cambridge. He also is a part-time research assistant for the Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. His writing focuses mainly on literariness in ancient texts from Anatolia. Forthcoming articles include “Towards a Stylistics of Hittite: The ‘Poetic Function’ in the Story of Appu” and “Visual Rhetoric: Physical Design for Semantic Stress on the Luwian Südburg Inscription.”
Louise Pryke is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Ishtar (Routledge, 2017), and Gilgamesh (Routledge, 2018). She is currently writing a cultural history of wind, from prehistory to pop culture, for Reaktion’s Earth series. Wind will be published in 2023.
Claudio Sansone is a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and an M.A. in Classics. He received his B.A. Hons. in English from Trinity College Dublin. His work centers on affect and labor in premodern literary traditions, primarily Greco-Roman, Near Eastern, and Indian.
Selena Wisnom is Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester. Previously she was a Lecturer in Assyriology at the University of Cambridge, a Junior Research Fellow in Manuscript and Text Cultures at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and an AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. Selena is a specialist in the interpretation of Mesopotamian cultural sources, particularly poetry and divination. Her book Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry was published by Brill in 2020, and she has published articles on a variety of literary topics.
Annette Zgoll is a Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Seminar for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Göttingen, Spokesperson of the DFG Research Group 2064 STRATA: Stratification Analyses of Mythic Plots and Texts in Ancient Cultures, Director of the interdisciplinary Collegium Mythologicum Göttingen, Co-founder of the series Mythological Studies, and Member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.