Course Descriptions
©Kahn: Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau
To enroll in an ISAW course, you must first obtain the permission of the instructor. You may then forward the permission email to isaw.academic.affairs@nyu.edu to get the registration access code. All classes will be held in the 2nd-floor Seminar Room at ISAW unless indicated otherwise.
Spring 2025: Seminar on the Interconnected Ancient World
The Interconnected Ancient World: 1-500 CE
Lillian Tseng and Sebastian Heath
lillian.tseng@nyu.edu; sebastian.heath@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3031-001
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructors is required.
Spring 2025: Research Seminars
The Animal Across Disciplines in the Roman Mediterranean
Claire Bubb
cc148@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-001
Mondays, 2:00-5:00pm
Animals were integrated into many aspects of life in antiquity and have left their mark in the textual, material, and archaeological records. This class will focus on human interactions with animals in the Roman Mediterranean, offering a synthetic view of the different types of evidence available. With this goal in mind, the course will begin with sessions devoted to cattle, flock animals, and equids, respectively, each taking a holistic look at the animals in the historical record, including literary appearances, artistic representations, ancient technical writing, and zooarchaeological remains. Subsequent weeks will consider the more diverse groups of species (real and imagined) that fall under the heading of pets, exotic animals, and (quasi-)mythical animals, including the role that fossils may have played in the ancient zoological imaginary. The second half of the class will turn more directly to the study of human-animal interactions, covering the topics of the religious role of animals, hunting, diet, the scientific study of animals in antiquity, and literary and artistic deployments of animals.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Early Iron Age Complex Societies in Ancient Western Asia and the Emergence of the Scytho-Siberian Phenomenon
Sören Stark and Annarita Bonfanti
soeren.stark@nyu.edu; ab11866@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-002
Thursdays, 2:00-5:00pm
Permission of the instructors is required.
Antiquarians and Curators: Ancient Art Collecting and Displaying Practices
Roberta Casagrande-Kim and Maya Muratov
rck3@nyu.edu; mbm224@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3012-003
Thursdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
This course explores major issues pertinent to the collection, display, and curation of ancient art by offering a historical and contemporary perspective. Central topics will include history of collecting from Antiquity onwards and early history of museums, historical and contemporary issues of acquisition, development of cross-cultural thematic exhibitions, use of design and technology in contemporary modes of display, as well as audience development and engagement.
The seminar will alternate between lectures from both professors and meetings in ISAW's galleries and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Permission of the instructors is required.
Ancient Worlds and World Systems: Interaction, Interconnection and Comparison
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-001
Fridays, 2:00-5:00pm
The terms "interaction" and "interconnection" are much invoked in academic discourse (indeed are considered to be foundational to the mission of this Institute), but what do they actually mean? How have these terms been used in ancient studies and its multiple overlapping disciplines? What concepts do they entail and how do they relate to one another? How do they map across different disciplines and what sorts of historical subjects do they imagine? Is interconnection, for instance, in opposition to comparison or its complement? Should it be ancient "world", "worlds" or "world systems" and how does this conceptualization relate to the sort of relationality one chooses to embrace or the historical subject one chooses to imagine?
This course will engage diverse theories concerning interaction, interconnection and comparison in the past, exploring their theoretical assumptions, the modes of relationality they invoke and the various engagements with the past they imply. Readings will range across a number of disciplines and from foundational figures of historiography and social theory to recent developments. This seminar will be reading intensive.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Introduction to Oracle-bone Inscription Chinese
Roderick Campbell
rbc2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3013-002
Wednesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
This course will introduce students to the earliest extant form of the Chinese script - the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions. The seminar will proceed from a brief historical and archaeological contextualization of the corpus to the fundamentals of Chinese paleography and work up to translating increasingly difficult inscriptions. The seminar will cover basic issues in oracle-bone studies, the fundamentals of Shang grammar and morphology and a grounding in paleographic principles. Students will be taught the use of various dictionaries, concordances and oracle-bone collections.
Prerequisites: working knowledge of modern and Classical Chinese.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Borderlands and Peripheries: Political Archaeology of the Liminal Regions of the Assyrian Empire (9th-7th cc. BCE)
Beate Pongratz-Leisten and Lorenzo d'Alfonso
lda5@nyu.edu; bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-001
Tuesdays, 9:00am-12:00pm
With its overwhelming military force, and an ideological and material apparatus the Assyrian empire features in the Old Testament, in the indigenous political narrative, and in the archaeological record as the most effective, powerful and visible political machine of ancient western Asia. Exactly because it has been so widely investigated, the Assyrian empire offers a unique case study for investigating processes of cultural interaction in non-core and border regions.
The seminar will first introduce theoretical literature on the theme of borders, group identity formation and cultural contact, with attention to the specific case of unbalanced political circumstances. It will then consider the study of the different non-core and border zones of the empire with their different histories and traditions (Babylon, Elam, the Zagros, Urartu, the post-Hittite canton states, Muški, the Syro-Hittite world, the Canaanite city-states, Israel and Judah) using the epigraphic and OT textual materials, but moving particularly from the evidence emerging from the archaeological record.
Permission of the instructors is required.
Spring 2025: Other Courses
Advanced Ancient Egyptian II
Niv Allon
Niv.Allon@metmuseum.org
ISAW-GA 1003-001
Fridays, 9:00am-12:00pm
This course will focus on reading Middle Egyptian texts in a variety of genres. Special consideration will be given to the grammar of the texts, as well as the materiality and historical, cultural, and archaeological context.
Prerequisites: ISAW-GA 1000, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian I"; ISAW-GA 1001, "Intro to Ancient Egyptian II"; and ISAW-GA 1002, "Advanced Ancient Egyptian I" (or equivalent coursework).
Permission of the instructor is required.
Statistical Programming for Ancient World Study
Patrick Burns
pjb311@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-001
Mondays, 5:15-6:45pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor
This two-credit course introduces students to statistical programming in R with a focus on working with archaeological data, historical-language philological data, and other types of ancient-world data. The course uses Thulin's Modern Statistics with R: From wrangling and exploring data to inference and predictive modelling book, supplementing the examples used here with datasets directly relevant to ancient world study. Topics covered include data collection and transformation, exploratory data analysis and visualization, and basic introductions to regression models and predictive models, though the primary focus of the course will be instructing students on best practices for working with R for quantitative research. Weekly readings will supplement coding assignments with special topics related to the role of statistics in archaeology and philology. For the course's final project, students can either reproduce a quantitative analysis from their area of ancient world research or develop one of their own. There are no prerequisites for this course.
Permission of the instructor is required.
The Culture of Production in the Administrative and Literary Texts in Ancient Mesopotamia
Beate Pongratz-Leisten
bpl2@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3018-002
Thursdays, 10:00am-1:00pm
Large Conference Room, 6th Floor
Permission of the instructor is required.
Race and Roman Art
John Hopkins
jnh1@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-002
Mondays, 2:00-4:45pm
Location, TBD (Downtown, NYU)
4 credits. Roman art history is tinged with race. It is epitomized in canonical artforms that have been made to seem appropriate (so, appropriated) for Europeans/Whites but not others. It is clouded by the racialization of peoples and by a history of racism and supremacist thought that appropriated a diverse population for one region's dominance. At the same time, from the first moments of modern critical study of art in the fifteenth century and through Enlightenment study of the ancient Mediterranean, Roman culture has held a place at the center of the Humanities, the field of Art History, and the idea of what it means to be intellectual. This course examines the racialization of ancient peoples, their use in the supremacist creation and maintenance of a "Western" canon and the ways that Romans, people living under Roman occupation, and their art has been appropriated and assimilated for European intellectual and historical hegemony. Just as importantly, this course looks to antiquity itself to assess how the diverse and entangled peoples of the whole Mediterranean came under Roman occupation, all the while composing a world of art that was only Roman in part. For many apologists and intellectual champions of "Classical" art, the diversity of the Empire and the powers that elites (even a few emperors) who hailed from multiple backgrounds wielded has seemed a means to champion an open culture. Two important correctives to this are 1) how assimilationist tendencies often cleansed the empire of its diversity or tokenized othered people, and 2) that scholarship still focuses on the role of a select canon of art and an elite ancient community who pushed a predatory imperialist agenda that often fueled epistemicide and the cleansing of heritage. With this in mind, we will close the semester by considering how the field might "re-member, re-claim and re-empower" ancient Mediterranean peoples.
Permission of the instructor is required.
Akkadian II
Quinn Daniels
dqd204@nyu.edu
ISAW-GA 3003-003
Meeting time and location, TBD
This course is the second module of a four-semester sequence that covers the essentials of the Akkadian language. Here, the student will continue to sharpen their facility with the grammar, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and writing system of the Old Babylonian dialect.
In order to take the course, the student must have taken the first installment, Akkadian I, as a prerequisite.
Permission of the instructor is required.