From the Director

This article first appeared in ISAW Newsletter 18 (Spring 2017).

As ISAW approaches the end of its first decade of operation, and moves into its quieter estival mode, I can both look back over the activities and accomplishments of the past academic year and anticipate the coming one with unalloyed pleasure. Though still young, our doctoral program has earned a reputation for innovation and quality such as to attract applicants from the most prestigious universities. Classes such as the seminar on Late Bronze Age Northern Mesopotamia described in this issue draw graduate students and other academic participants not just from within ISAW but across NYU and other nearby institutions. Lectures, conferences, and other public programming also continue to be hugely successful, filling our lecture hall with engaged audiences from the broader community.

Our exhibition Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity wrapped up in April, and the complex process of deinstallation, involving twenty-seven lenders, went by with astonishing smoothness; for me as the curator it was a bittersweet series of partings with many rare and remarkable objects that had come to feel like old friends. But even before the exhibition closed, our involvement in the Guggenheim Museum’s …circle through New York project (see back page) had begun with month-long collaborative visits from the other five participants that will continue to run through the end of the summer. Everyone at ISAW will come away with their own highlights from this project; for many of us, the May residency of Pinkie the salmon-crested cockatoo, normally at home at Pet Resources in the South Bronx, was particularly special, and we are also grateful to our Assistant Research Scholar Patrick Burns for bringing out Pinkie’s links to the ancient world in two informal talks on parrots in the Classical world.

I wish the ISAW community and all our readers a productive summer!

Alexander Jones
Interim Director and Professor of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity