Contributors
M. Erica Couto-Ferreira
teaches Sumerian at the
Lesley Dean-Jones
is Associate Professor of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, The Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the Loeb Foundation. She was President of the Society for Ancient Medicine 2000–2006, and is the co-editor of Acta Hippocratica xiii. She has published on Greek literature, history, philosophy and medicine, including, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford University Press, 1994). Her current major research topics are a translation and commentary on Historia Animalium x for Cambridge University Press, as well as the early professionalization of and effects of literacy on Greek medicine.
Janet Downie
is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. She specializes in Greek, and her research and publications focus on literature of the Roman imperial period. She is the author of At the Limits of Art: A Literary Reading of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi (Oxford, 2013) and has published articles on a range of texts and authors of the imperial period, including Philostratus, Artemidorus, Galen, and Dionysius the Periegete. Her current research focuses on the perception and description of the landscapes of Asia Minor in imperial literature.
Brooke Holmes
is Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where she also directs the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (
J. Cale Johnson
(Ph.D.,
Paul T. Keyser
studied physics and classics at St. Andrew’s School, Duke University, and Boulder, Colorado. After a few years of research and teaching in Classics, at Edmonton, Cornell, and other places, he returned to his first love, coding. He is now working as a Site-Reliability Engineer for Google, in Pittsburgh. His publications include work on gravitational physics, on stylometry, and on ancient science and technology. Current ancient science projects investigate case studies as evidence for the evolution of science, early Greek cosmology, the nature and role of experiments, the evolution of ancient science, “classic” lineages, and information-cascades.
Rune Nyord
(dr. phil., Copenhagen, 2010) is an Egyptologist and researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests focus on approaches to ancient concepts and ontology, and he has worked extensively on ancient Egyptian conceptions of the body in religion and medicine. Other areas of research include Egyptian mortuary religion and cognitive approaches to ancient Egyptian language. He is the author of Breathing Flesh: Conceptions of the Body in the Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts (Copenhagen 2009) and is currently working on a book exploring the conceptual underpinnings of the mortuary religion of the Middle Kingdom.
Strahil Valentinov Panayotov
began his studies on Ancient History and Egyptology in Sofia, Bulgaria (2000) and finished his Magister Artium (2009) in Assyriology, Egyptology, and Near Eastern Archaeology at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. He was awarded funds by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes for both his M.A. studies as well as his Ph.D. (2014) research on Mesopotamian ‘amulet-shaped’ tablets. Together with the
Courtney Ann Roby
is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the literary aspects of scientific and technical texts from the ancient Mediterranean world. Her first book, Technical Ekphrasis in Greek and Roman Science and Literature: The Written Machine between Alexandria and Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2016), traces the literary techniques used in the textual representation of technological artifacts from Hellenistic Greece to late-ancient Rome. Her current work includes a book project on Hero of Alexandria and articles on concepts of distributed cognition and scientific models in antiquity, as well as the early modern reception of ancient science and technology.
Ulrike Steinert
studied Assyriology and Social Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1997–2004, and received a Ph.D. in Assyriology at the University of Göttingen in 2007. During 2011–2013, she held a Medical History and Humanities Fellowship by the Wellcome Trust London. Since 2013, Ulrike has been appointed Postdoctoral Researcher for the project “BabMed–Babylonian Medicine” at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her current work focuses on an edition of Mesopotamian medical texts concerned with women’s health. Her research interests and publications center on Mesopotamian cultural history, the Akkadian language, the history of medicine, science and religion, medical cuneiform texts, gender and body concepts, as well as metaphor research. She is author of a study on the body, self and identity in Mesopotamian texts, entitled Aspekte des Menschseins im Alten Mesopotamien. Eine Studie zu Person und Identität im 2. und 1. Jt. v. Chr. (Brill, 2012).
John Z. Wee
read Assyriology and Classical History at Yale University (Ph.D., 2012) with a fellowship at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (2008–2009), before his appointments as Provost’s Fellow (2012–2014) and Assistant Professor (2015–) at the University of Chicago. He is a historian of science, medicine, and mathematics in Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman antiquity, and author of several articles on the cultural histories of astronomical and medical ideas, scientific and mathematical language, and scholasticism in ancient commentaries. Also from Brill are his monographs on Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (2018) and Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig (2018).