Anne-Caroline RENDU LOISEL received her PhD in 2011 from the University of Geneva on Noise and Emotions in Akkadian Literature. In 2016, she published a monograph entitled Les chants du monde: Le paysage sonore de l’ancienne Mésopotamie (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi). From 2015 to 2017, she directed the interdisciplinary research project Synaesthesia-Expérience du divin et polysensorialité dans les mondes anciens (University of Toulouse, France, with Adeline Grand-Clément). Her main research interests focus on religious practices and beliefs in the ancient Near East, and on cultural and religious anthropology, with a special focus on sensory phenomena. She is now Maître de conferences in Assyriology at the University of Strasbourg (FRANCE).
She is also a member of the new archaeological mission in Eridu (Abu Šahrein – Iraq), started in 2018 and directed by Franco d’Agostino (University of La Sapienza) and Philippe Quenet (University of Strasbourg). During her stay at ISAW, Anne-Caroline will focus her research on the cultural status and beliefs attributed to that very old city in the Akkadian and bilingual traditions of the 1st millennium. This research requires an interdisciplinary framework, as it supposes crossing boundaries of space and time in the Mesopotamian area, and questioning the reception of the Sumerian culture and its integration in the scholarly lore of the Assyrian and Babylonian experts.