ISAW Commencement 2025
Two ISAW students were awarded doctoral degrees in May 2025: Mi Wang and Amber Jacob. The ISAW community celebrated these students’ accomplishments at an in-person graduation ceremony and reception on May 14th, 2025, and at the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Science Doctoral Convocation on May 16th, 2025.
We are extremely proud of ISAW’s May 2025 graduating class!
Our PhD Graduates
Mi Wang received a BA in Translation and Interpreting from the Zhejiang Normal University, China, in 2016 and an MA in Archaeology from Boston University in 2018. During her MA, she pursued archaeological theories and methods, archaeological sciences, and cultural heritage management. Her MA project investigated the identity formation in Neolithic Liangzhu Culture in south China using Geographic Information System (GIS) as well as the legacy of Liangzhu in the present Jiangnan region.
At ISAW, Mi has explored the transformation of cultural identity during the mid-to-late Liangzhu period, examining whether and how it influenced other cultural behaviors such as diet through the studies of stable isotope analysis, archaeobotany, and residue analysis. Furthermore, her work has investigated how non-Central Plains cultures in China like Liangzhu were embodied into the modern concept of Chinese Civilization, and how these social memories have influenced the contemporary interpretations of these cultures.
Her advisor, Prof. Rod Campbell, comments: “Mi Wang successfully defended her dissertation on April 7th. Combining social theory, ancient textual analyses and archaeological science, Dr. Wang has contributed an ambitious study of the historical and archaeological metanarratives surrounding the gigantic Chinese Neolithic site of Liangzhu. Mi secured a prestigious two year Humboldt Fellowship at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich under Prof. Armin Selbitschka.”
We wish to congratulate Mi, who has been awarded a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Beginning summer 2025, with a four-month German language course, Mi will spend 24 months at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Amber Jacob received her BA in Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia in 2013 and her MA at the University of Copenhagen in 2016. During her MA, she pursued Egyptian philology, literature, and papyrology, specializing in late Egyptian language (particularly Demotic) and critical analysis of textual traditions. Through her doctoral work at ISAW, she has pursued her interest in ancient science by opening up new avenues of research in ancient medicine through a comparative study of ancient Greek and Egyptian medical practice in Graeco-Roman Egypt.
Through critical analysis of contemporary ancient Greek and Egyptian sources, her work addresses the question of the cross-cultural interaction and influence between the medical traditions of the two cultures. She undertook an interdisciplinary project involving a case study of the entirety of medical papyri found in the Fayum city of Tebtunis. This assemblage is unique in that it includes the largest number of Demotic medical texts recovered from any Egyptian site and the fourth largest number of Greek medical texts. The Demotic texts, housed in the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection, are entirely unpublished, and the edition of this material formed part of her work at ISAW.
Her advisor, Prof. Alexander Jones comments: “Amber entered ISAW's doctoral program having established such impressive competence in Demotic Egyptian language and script that she was entrusted with the publication of the whole corpus of Demotic medical texts in the Carsberg Collection in Copenhagen, which has the largest and most important body of unpublished Egyptian-language scientific texts from Greco-Roman Egypt. Her dissertation, which constitutes the major part of this project, has a breadth that shows how thoroughly she embraced ISAW's interdisciplinary and cross-cultural vision. At ISAW she will be remembered as one of the inaugural leadership of our Student Council, which played a very positive, indeed necessary role in sustaining our Institute through the difficult first months of the pandemic. She is also a founder and co-director of the international collaboration Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt (SciPap), in connection with which she was both the driving force behind our securing an NEH grant for the 2022 SciPap conference and the hard-working co-editor of the beautiful proceedings volume from the 2018 and 2019 conferences, published in the ISAW Monographs series.”
For the 2025-26 academic year, Amber will be jointly appointed as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. In fall 2026, she will then take up a new position as Assistant Professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and the College.
Left to right: Mi's mother, Mi Wang, Roderick Campbell, Mi's father
Left to right: Alexander Jones, Amber Jacob, Claire Bubb
Left to right, starting at the back: Kate Justement, Amber Jacob, Tianrui Zhu, Katherine Thompson, Braden Cordivari, Manolis Mavromatis, Ida Adsbøl-Christensen, Yukina Zhang, Kechu Huang, Mi Wang, Isabel Grossman-Sartain, Stefano Aprà