Abigail Hoskins

Abigail Hoskins is an ancient historian who specializes in the intellectual and religious history of the Hellenistic Mediterranean world. She received her PhD in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2024, her MA from Berkeley in 2019, and her BA in Classics and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from the University of Chicago in 2015. Abigail's doctoral thesis is a microhistorical study of a dossier of cuneiform texts written or owned by a scribe who lived and worked in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk in the late fourth century BCE.

Abigail's work engages with questions of continuity and change between the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods, tradition and innovation in Babylonian scribal culture, and moments of contact and exchange between Greece and Mesopotamia. Abigail strives to take a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to the study of the ancient world. She deals with both material and textual culture and works with texts in Greek, Latin, Akkadian, and Sumerian.

At ISAW, she plans to continue her work on a monograph and a series of articles on the intellectual culture of Hellenistic Babylonia.