Anne Porter

Educated at the universities of Melbourne and Chicago, and now an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California with a triple appointment in the School of Religion, and departments of Classics and Art History, Anne Porter is an archaeologist who employs widely-ranging sources, theories and methods in her work on the societies of the ancient Near East from the fourth to second millennium BCE. While she has published works on a variety of specific topics, such as chronology, state formation and mortuary practices, she considers these but facets of her primary task: to try and understand the experience of being Mesopotamian. She was recently a Visiting Professor at the Collège de France, where she lectured on the outcomes of fragmentation and dispersal among mobile populations for Near Eastern history.