Ryan Schnell received his BA in Ancient Near Eastern Studies with an emphasis in Biblical Hebrew from Brigham Young University. He then received his MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, where he wrote a thesis entitled “Shall No Man Raise His Sister’s Son?: The Anatolian Avuncular System in the II and I Millennia.” In his thesis work, he focused on applying anthropological models to reconstruct the kinship and inheritance systems integral to the Anatolian ethnolinguistic group, situating them in the context of their Near Eastern and Aegean neighbors and offering new insights into the history of the Hittite Old Kingdom.
During his time at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Ryan’s work has focused on the history, culture, literature, religion, and archaeology of the Syro-Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Levantine spheres. His dissertation, entitled “This Stone I Carved Myself: Monumental Writing in Iron Age Central Anatolia,” discusses the production of monumental stone carvings, of which writing was a key component, in the canton states of Early and Middle Iron Age Central Anatolia north of the Taurus. His dissertation work focuses on understanding the visual and linguistic markers evident in the stonework’s physical and stylistic makeup and how these markers served as evidence of political and cultural agency in the face of territorial expansion by rival states. He was awarded a NYU Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship (2024-2025) and a Doctoral Student Fellowship at the NYU Center for the Humanities, participated in the joint ISAW-NYU and University of Pavia archeological excavations at the site of Kınık Höyük, and is a Project Researcher with the Anatolian Hieroglyphic Paleography Project.