Dr. Amanda Hills Podany is a Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where she served on the faculty until May 2025. 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.
She studies the history of Mesopotamia and Syria in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, with a particular focus on the kingdom of Hana and its contributions to understanding of the chronology of the second millennium BCE. Dr. Podany has authored many articles on topics such as scribal tradition, interstate relations, and ancient legal practices. In 2013 Podany was the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her monographs include The Land of Hana: Kings, Chronology, and Scribal Tradition (CDL Press, 2002) and Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East (OUP, 2010).
She has a particular commitment to increasing the familiarity of a wider public with the ancient Middle East. To that end, she co-authored a book for young adults (The Ancient Near Eastern World, with Marni McGee, OUP 2005), published a short overview of the field (The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction, OUP 2014), and wrote and presented a 24-part lecture series for the Great Courses (Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization, 2018).
In her 2022 book, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East (OUP) she took a microhistorical approach, viewing 3,000 years of history through the lives of real individuals whose life stories can be reconstructed from cuneiform records and archaeological evidence. While at ISAW she will be working on a new book--again written as microhistory--this time to discover more about the lived experiences of travelers and the nature of travel in the Old Babylonian period. She will analyze surviving letters, along with itineraries and literary, legal, and administrative works, viewing them in the context of archaeological material from the same time period, in order to paint a broader picture of what it meant to travel, and how travel was experienced on an everyday basis in this era.