Dr. Gunvor Lindström is a Classical Archaeologist by training, navigating the shores of neighboring disciplines. An internationally recognized expert on Hellenism in the Ancient East, she has conducted numerous research projects in Central Asia, Iran, and Mesopotamia, focusing on the Achaemenid, Hellenistic, and Parthian periods.
After completing her dissertation on seals and sealings from Hellenistic Uruk at the Free University of Berlin (published in 2003), she has spent most of her academic career at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). Since 2004, she has conceived and directed several high-profile projects at the Institute's Eurasia Department. Gunvor Lindström has investigated votive practices in Hellenistic and Kushan Bactria, including studies of votive offerings from the famous Oxus Temple. She discovered and excavated a Hellenistic sanctuary at Torbulok in modern Tajikistan (2013-2018), now one of the few well-researched Hellenistic sites and thus an important reference point in Hellenistic Bactria. In recent years, she has worked intensively on Hellenistic art in Central Asia and Iran, conducting the first systematic study of bronze and marble statues from Kale-e Chendar in Khuzestan (better known as Shami), and identifying a monumental bronze portrait statue of a prominent Hellenistic ruler in the National Museum of Iran.
Networking and communicating archaeological research to a wider public is one of Gunvor Lindström's passions. She was the speaker of the research cluster "Sanctuaries" of the German Archaeological Institute and is a committee member of the Hellenistic Central Asia Research Network (HCARN). As curator of the exhibition Alexander the Great and the Opening of the World, which toured Germany, Austria, and Spain (2009-2010), she brought the discoveries and results of recent research in the Hellenistic East to the general public.
As a Visiting Research Scholar at ISAW, Gunvor Lindström takes as her starting point a relief vase from Denavar in Iran that she has reconstructed from fragments scattered across museums and collections on three continents. Through the biographies of the fragments and the famous scholars and connoisseurs who incorporated them into their collections, she will embark on a varied journey through the art history and historiography of Hellenistic and Parthian art, stopping off at the decorative arts and museum presentations of the 19th century and leading into the waters of political history from the First to the end of the Second World War. She will set down the story of this journey in a book that includes storytelling elements and perhaps also graphic-novel sections, aimed at a broad audience interested in archaeology and history.