OUR RESEARCHERS
SARA MOHR
Brown University, Assyriology
My primary research interests lie in the digital humanities with the goal of making Assyriology and Assyriological research more accessible to researchers outside of our field and to the general public. 3D scans not only allow researchers to better study a medium that is inherently 3D, but it also opens up a wide variety of applications that can be used to enhance classroom and museum experiences.
Starting in summer 2019, I will be using a 3D scanner to digitize the collection of cuneiform tablets and foundation pegs currently held by the John Hay Library at Brown University. These scans will be published as part of a new format of digital publication that will allow greater access to the objects for museum display and academic research.
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MELINA SEABROOK
Harvard University, Anthropology
My research focuses on human-animal interactions in early cities. I hope to use a variety of methods including faunal analysis, landscape mapping, and stable isotopic sampling to better understand the variety of ways people interacted with animals in these crowded urban centers. These ancient cities could be large, along with the lines of 2 square miles (5 square kilometers); thus, I hope to see how different areas of the cities interacted with animals in ways similar or dissimilar to each other.
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JENNA STOVER-KEMP
University of California, Berkeley, Hebrew Bible
I am interested in cultural memory and intertextuality, and my dissertation traces three case studies from different literary genres and analyzes how relatively late biblical authors work with the memory of earlier text. Principally, I am interested in how forgetting is an aide to the preservation of cultural memory and the formation of literary canon. My work is a multi-disciplinary attempt to theorize the intertextual nature of much of the Hebrew Bible as a function of cultural memory. My findings suggest that while the act of memory maintains and strengthens the presence of the text within hermeneutical culture, it is forgetting that creates space for the text to acquire new meaning diachronically, allowing it to continue to be culturally productive and useful in a multitude of presents.
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