Welcome to ISAW's Visiting Research Scholars for the 2025-2026 Academic Year!
Click here to read more about our scholars and their research interests.
Amanda Cates Ball
Visiting Assistant Professor 2025-2027
Amanda Cates Ball is a Mediterranean archeologist specializing in sacred landscapes and material evidence of cultural interaction between Greeks and Thracians in the northeast Aegean. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025, her MA in Classical Archeology from UNC Chapel Hill in 2019, her MA in Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from University of Pennsylvania in 2015, and her B.A. in Classical Studies from UPenn in 2014.
Aydogdy Kurbanov
Research Scholar 2025-2026
Aydogdy Kurbanov is a historian and archaeologist specializing in the prehistoric and Late Antique periods of Central Asia. He earned his Ph.D. in 2010 from the Free University of Berlin, with a dissertation titled “The Hephthalites: Archaeological and Historical Analysis” - a comprehensive study of the Late Antique period in Central Asia.
Brian Lander
Research Scholar 2025-2026
Brian Lander is an environmental historian of China. He uses textual, archaeological and paleoecological evidence to study the long history of how humans gradually transformed the forests and wetlands of the core regions of Chinese civilization into farmland. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2015 and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard University Center for the Environment at Brown University.
Amanda Hills Podany
Visiting Scholar Fall 2025
Amanda Hills Podany is a Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern History from UCLA, following completion of an MA in Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London.
Jay Stephens
Visiting Assistant Professor 2025-2027
Jay Stephens applies principles and methodologies from archeology, material sciences, and geochemistry to study the history of mining and metallurgy, particularly within southern Africa. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona and was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Archaeometry Laboratory at the University of Missouri Research Reactor from 2023-2025.
Zeev Weiss
Research Scholar Spring & Summer 2026
Zeev Weis is the Eleazar L. Sukenik Professor of Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in Roman and Late Antique art and architecture in the provinces of Syria-Palestine. Weiss is a Fulbright scholar and has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (IAS), Princeton University, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University, and Bard Graduate Center (BGC).
May-Sarah Zeßin
Research Scholar 2025-2026
May-Sarah Zeßin is a dedicated and passionate archaeologist who researches the intersection of archeological practice, craftsmanship, and material culture in the ancient Near East, with a particular focus on the interpretation of production and craftsmen’s marks on ivories, stone objects, and glazed bricks from the first millennium BCE.She holds a B.A. in Cultural Studies from the Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) and an M.A. in History and Cultures of the Ancient Near East from Freie Universität Berlin. She completed her doctoral dissertation at Goethe University Frankfurt in April 2025.