Visiting Assistant Professor Spotlight: Gina Konstantopoulos

During my first term as a visiting assistant professor at ISAW, I was able to attend a two-week advanced seminar in the humanities, Literature and Culture in the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece, Rome, and the Near East, held at end of November at Venice International University (VIU). This program provided a fantastic opportunity to interact with both senior and junior scholars from the various areas of study connected to the ancient world, with both introductory lectures and more advanced workshops led by the senior scholars in attendance. I will return to VIU in the fall of 2016 to present my own paper, focused on the theme of resistance to royal ideology as demonstrated in Sumerian proverbs and satirical literature from the early second millennium BCE. The seminar has been one part of a busy year so far, having begun work on revisions of my dissertation, which centers on the Sebettu-demons in Mesopotamia, I have also been exploring side projects. I travelled to Yale to present in-progress work on unpublished Sumerian text at a meeting of the Cuneiforum working group and have completed the drafts of two articles, the first of which centers on shape-shifting and metamorphoses in Sumerian literary texts, while the second focuses on a particular tablet, Rm. 714, held in the collections of the British Museum. 

Moving forward, I am continuing my own work on liminal beings and spaces: or, monsters and imaginary places in the ancient Near East. The latter is the focus of my main project during my time at ISAW, and I have begun to develop my research in the direction of several constructed or fictionalized places in Mesopotamia, such as the fictional site of Aratta, as well as the lands of Magan, Marhashi, and Dilmun, which were actual locations rendered fantastical by their distance from Mesopotamia. I am particularly interested in the intersection between economic texts, which demonstrate frequent trade with these latter three locations and the more fantastic representations seen in literary texts of the second millennium BCE. I will explore some of these themes in a workshop ("As Above, So Below: Religion and Geography") I am organizing alongside Shana Zaia of Yale University at the 2016 meeting of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Philadelphia. In the upcoming months, I will be continuing work on this project, the major themes of which will reappear as the focus of a graduate seminar, "Frontiers and Fictional Lands in the ancient Near East," which I will teach in the fall, along with a course in beginning Sumerian. In the meantime, I will be presenting papers on similar, as well as quite different, topics at the 2016 American Oriental Society meeting in March, at a conference at the University of Michigan in April, and at a workshop, Cult Practices in Ancient Literature, organized by Franziska Naether at ISAW in May.

Read more about Gina's research on her bio page here.