Samantha Rainford is a PhD candidate in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Assyriology. She received her BA from the University of Toronto, where she studied Hebrew Bible in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, and her MA in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies from New York University's Department of Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian Studies. Her research interests include law, gender, violence, households and family, and the translatability of culture and ideologies between Mesopotamia, Syria, and the Levant during the second and first millennia BCE. She is particularly interested in the relationship between law and other forms of cultural discourse, including how legal concepts were adapted and expressed in literary, religious, and political contexts.
Her dissertation, Gender as Legal Fiction in Ancient Near Eastern Worldmaking, examines how gendered legal status was constructed in response to disruptions in patrilineal succession. Drawing on legal and literary theories of fiction, metaphor, and worldmaking, she examines how daughters were assigned male legal status to secure patrimonial inheritance and sustain household cultic obligations. Her dissertation approaches legal practice as a generative cultural discourse whose concepts, constructions, and terminology could be transposed into literary constructions of ancestry and configurations of the diachronic family, approaching legal documents from Late Bronze Age Emar, Ekalte, and Nuzi together with literary narratives concerning inheritance from second-millennium Syria and the Hebrew Bible. In doing so, she traces how the phenomenon of daughters, operating as primary heirs within their literary worlds, were positioned as male patrilineal carriers through whom social identities were constructed and negotiated, legitimating claims of inheritance by those looking to an ancestral past. By integrating cuneiform evidence and the Hebrew Bible, Samantha's work bridges the academic boundaries within ancient Near Eastern studies–namely, Assyriology and biblical studies–to examine how law and literature participated in social worldmaking through expressions of gender, kinship, and inheritance.
Samantha's additional research explores the cultural and intellectual networks through which cultural knowledge circulated across ancient West Asia. She examines the transmission of scholarly knowledge among and between Assyria, Babylonia, Syria, and the Levant, and its adaptation or application in local traditions. She is particularly interested in conceptions of cosmic and world order through law, violence, and ideological discourses in the cuneiform world and beyond. Samantha regularly presents her research at the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR), the Workshop on Gender, Methodology, and the Ancient Near East (GeMANE), the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (RAI), and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). She serves on the Society of Biblical Literature's Assyriology and the Bible steering committee and is a founding co-organizer of the Ancient Law Working Group (ALWG). In 2026, she was the lead organizer of ISAW's Graduate Symposium in Ancient Near Eastern Studies (GSANES 8). She was awarded the 2026–2027 Lane Cooper Dissertation Fellowship in support of her dissertation completion.
For any questions about her work or research interests, feel free to reach out!