Fellows 2024-2025
2024-2025 Fellows & Projects
Fellows by Year
- Fellows 2024-2025
- Fellows 2023-2024
- Fellows 2022-2023
- Fellows 2020-2022
- Fellows 2018-2019
- Fellows 2017-2018
- Fellows 2016-2017
- Fellows 2015-2016
- Fellows 2014-2015
- Fellows 2013-2014
- Fellows 2012-2013
- Fellows 2010-2011
- Fellows 2009-2010
- Fellows 2008-2009
- Fellows 2007-2008
- Fellows 2006-2007
- Fellows 2005-2006
- Fellows 2004-2005
- Fellows 2003-2004
- Fellows 2002-2003
- Fellows 2001-2002
- Fellows 2000-2001
- Fellows 1999-2000
Nasrin Abu Baker
Jerusalem Culture Unlimited Artist
Fellow
Biography
Nasrin Abu Baker, born in 1977 in Zalafa village, is an artist whose work blurs the lines between the personal and political. Raised in a traditional society, her art reflects themes of gender roles and societal norms. Inspired by her working-class parents, she creates using accessible materials (Ready-made), challenging elitist artistic norms. Her diverse mediums include installations, paintings, and video art, often blending traditional and contemporary elements to explore cultural aesthetics and political conflicts.
Nasrin Abu Baker’s artistic journey is marked by formal education, including a Bachelor’s degree in Education and Art from the Hamidrasha Faculty of Art at Beit Berl, Israel, in 2008, and a Master’s degree (Meisterschülerstudium) from the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Academy in Leipzig, Germany, completed in 2021.
Nasrin divides her time between Israel and Germany, continually challenging and inspiring with her exploration of identity, belonging, and activism through art.
For more info about the artis Nasrin Abu Baker, please visit her website: www.nasrin-abu-baker.com
SAMI AL-QAQ
Jerusalem Culture Unlimited Artist
Fellow
Biography
Sami Al-Qaq has a degree in Visual Communications and is a guide for Arabic calligraphy at the Museum for Islamic Art. He has always been fascinated by ancient writings and the stages of their development until they reached the art form we know as calligraphy today. Among all the forms of calligraphy, Arabic calligraphy is perhaps the most fortunate, having emerged impressively throughout every time period of Islamic rule, with each civilization leaving its distinct mark on the art form.
Even in our modern world, where technology continually evolves, Arabic calligraphy still holds a great status and manages to keep pace with the times. My particular interests lie in the study of ancient manuscripts, as well as the Abbasid and Ottoman periods, which were the two most influential eras for the development of Arabic calligraphy.
Nadia Ben-Marzouk
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Research Associate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA
Biography
Nadia Ben-Marzouk received her Ph.D. in Levantine Archaeology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2020. From 2021-2023 she was a postdoctoral researcher on the SNSF Sinergia project, “Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant.” Her research examines systems of craft production in the eastern Mediterranean, exploring the organization and power dynamics of production, the identities, knowledge and skillsets of producers, and the various contexts in which production-related knowledge and practice were learned and transmitted.
Project
“Crafting Communities into Contact: Contextualizing Glyptic Interconnections in the Levant, Egypt, and Aegean (ca. 2500-1500 BCE)”
Nadia will be writing two chapters in her current book project “Crafting Communities into Contact: Investigating the Roles of Specialist Producers in the Making of an East Mediterranean Exchange System (ca. 2500-1500 BCE).” The book argues for the central role of craftspeople in the rise and spread of new technological innovations and practices during the late third to early second millennium BCE. By removing these active agents from the idealized workshop settings to which they are often confined, it explores their various types of embodied knowledge alongside the wider social networks and communities to which they belonged. At the Albright, Nadia will focus specifically on contextualizing the development of a visual koine on stamp and cylinder seal amulets alongside the rise of new pictographic scripts, manufacturing techniques, and shared material choices, bringing a new lens to the role of craftspeople in the development and spread of a shared visual language.
Andrew Bock
Educational & Cultural Affairs Junior Research Fellow
Biography
Andrew Bock is a doctoral candidate in the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (NELC) department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who specializes in the Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic inscriptions. His research interests include prophetic literature and phenomenon in the ancient Near East, scribal revision techniques in the Hebrew Bible and Akkadian literature, Sumerian and Akkadian language and literature, and the intersection of material culture and textual evidence.
Project
Bock’s current research project investigates the material and spatial dimensions of ancient prophecy in the southern Levant. It combines textual and archaeological evidence from Israel and the Transjordan to provide a more holistic account of prophets in the ancient Levant. With this project he intends to answer the following questions: Where do prophets operate, and why are these places significant? What are the materials used by prophets in the biblical and inscriptional record, and how can we identify prophets in the material record? While at the AIAR, he will focus on how prophetic rooms were a critical part of household religion in ancient Israel and the Transjordan during the 9th-8th centuries BCE.
David Brown
Educational & Cultural Affairs Junior Research Fellow
Biography
David Brown is a Ph.D. candidate studying Levantine archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His excavation experience includes seasons at Abila of the Decapolis and ‘Ayn Gharandal in Jordan, Zincirli Höyük in southeastern Turkey, and Tell Keisan and Tel Dan in northern Israel. He is currently completing his dissertation research on refugees and forced migration in the Early Iron Age southern Levant.
Project
His project explores the depths of refugee creation and reconstitution efforts during the consequential transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, using the southern Levant as his case study. By revisiting the legacy data and engaging with excavation reports of over one hundred sites, he collates the material signatures of forced migration expressed in a myriad of ways including reedifying domestic spaces, repurposing public architecture, overcoming food insecurity, and negotiating new social identities. The expected outcome of his work during this fellowship is to produce a comprehensive framework of the Early Iron Age sociopolitical landscape that is inclusive of invisible groups that evade the historical record—such as refugees—yet impacted the social, political, and economic trajectories of that age. In addition, he aims to present a revised model for analyzing refugees in the ancient world that scholars can apply to other case studies.
Biography
Jeffrey Cross studied classics for his BA at Baylor University. He then received his MA and PhD in classical and Near Eastern religions and cultures at the University of Minnesota. There he wrote his dissertation on scribal rewriting and textual development in the legal texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, under the direction of Professors Bernard Levinson (University of Minnesota) and Molly Zahn (Yale Divinity School).
Project
He was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Hellenistic Stoicism: Contributing to a More Equitable Intellectual History,” under the mentorship of Professor Noam Mizrahi at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this project Jeffrey examines conceptual similarities between the Dead Sea Scrolls and texts representing the views of Hellenistic Stoicism. In addition to demonstrating philosophical engagement between Jews writing in Hebrew, and Greek and Roman intellectuals, this research challenges the study of these literatures in isolation and models a more equitable intellectual history of the ancient Mediterranean.
Issam Halayqa
Ernest S. Frerichs Annual Professor
Biography
Issam Halayqa received his Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) 2002–2006. He was granted a two-year post-doctorate fellowship by the German Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung at Heidelberg University 2010–2013. Since 2008 he was appointed at the Dept. of History and Archaeology at Birzeit University. He authored many journal articles and contributions to books, his research focuses on ancient Northwest Semitic languages and epigraphy.
Project
“Persian Numismatic Finds from Palestine”
The project focuses on studying and analyzing remarkable collection of Persian silver coins (imperial and local) found in the West Bank and dated back to (550-330 BCE). A primary study for these collections have led us to classify them into seven representative sub-groups according to the mint place: Lydian, Persian coins from west and southwest Anatolia, those the Achaemenid satrapy of Anatolia, Phoenician coins, Achaemenid satrapy of Phoenicia, Philisto-Arabian coins (of Attica and Athens), Philisto-Arabian coins (imitation, mint of Gaza, Ascalon and Asdod), Samarian coins: Achaemenid satrapy of Samaria, as well as Idumean coins. As Halayqa was mandated to conduct a scientific study and analysis, the main goal of his work is to produce publications of these new and unknown finds, which will highly enrich and contribute to the field of numismatics by making the published data available for researchers and students worldwide.
Michael Hasel
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow
Professor at the Institute of Archaeology at Southern Adventist University
Biography
Michael G. Hasel, PhD is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Archaeology, Southern Adventist University and director of the Institute of Archaeology and Lynn H. Wood Archaeological Museum. He has written and edited ten books and over 150 articles in peer-reviewed journals, dictionaries and encyclopedias. He has excavated in Jordan, Cyprus and Israel, including serving as co-director of the Khirbet Qeiyafa Archaeological Project, the Socoh Survey, and The Fourth Expedition to Lachish.
Project
“The Fourth Expedition to Lachish (2013-2017), Vol. 1: The Palace Domestic Quarter (Area AA)”
Ancient Lachish (Tell ed–Duweir) in southern Israel is a key site for understanding the Canaanite cultures of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages and the Kingdom of Judah in the Iron Age. The project will be to write a final report volume for The Fourth Expedition to Lachish in 2013–2017, specifically Area AA, the domestic quarter north of the Palace-Fort courtyard. Part I will include introductory chapters outlining the goals and methodology of the project, survey and technologies employed to record data. Part II will focus on architecture and stratigraphy for Levels I-VI. Part III will provide specialized studies on dating aspects and small finds. Part IV will deal with discussion and conclusions. Finally, Part V will contain detailed field observations, including square supervisor reports, section drawings, and locus descriptions. Coordination with authors and staff in Israel will facilitate the completion of this important final report volume.
Roy Marom
Ernest S. Frerichs Annual Professor
Dan David Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of History at Tel Aviv University
Biography
Dr. Roy Marom is a Dan David Postdoctoral Fellow at Tel Aviv University. Previously, he served as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow in University of California, Berkeley (2022/23). Marom earned his PhD in Middle Eastern Studies (University of Haifa, 2022). Marom’s research focuses on the history of rural Palestine during the Late Ottoman and British Mandate periods. His broader academic work concerns Palestine’s historical geography from the Umayyad to the late Ottoman period.
Project
“Shifting Demographics: Charting Population Movements in Ottoman Palestine Using GIS”
The project is an ongoing effort to document, trace, and map population movements in Ottoman Palestine using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. Undertaken within the the Palestinian Rural History Project (PRHP), The project temporally and spatially interprets, maps, and visualizes various fiscal, legal and narrative primary sources using. The resultant quarriable geospatial database will serve as the basis for a series of papers exploring themes in Palestine’s historical geography during the Ottoman period, namely: the role of nomads vs. sedentary population in the expansion and contraction of the pale of settlement; the dialectic of highland vs. lowland populations; the origins of ‘new’ populations; the interactions between political/administrative superstructures and demographic/social figurations, and more.
Kathleen Nicoll
Seymour Gitin Distinguished Professor
Biography
Kathleen Nicoll is Professor of Geography in the School of Environment, Sustainability & Society. Her research focuses on geomorphology, geoarchaeology and arid lands with emphasis on Africa and the Middle East.
Project
“Digging Up Past Herstories: Documenting Elinor Wight Gardner and Her Colleagues’ Groundbreaking Contributions to the Archaeology of the Levant”
I am researching a “hidden figure” named Elinor Wight Gardner, who was the first female geoarchaeologist. While at the AIAR, I will conduct archival research to seek out relevant material (e.g., photos, slides, notes, reports, records, correspondences, maps, materials, accessions, collections) to develop new perspectives that characterize EWG in context of her scholarly contributions and collaborative projects in the Levant with: Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod; Dorothea Minola Alice Bate; James Leslie Starkey; Olga Tufnell; and Sir Flinders Petrie.
Doctoral Candidate in the
Seminar für Alte Geschichte at Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen
Biography
Timothy B. Sailors specializes in the academic study of ancient Christianity and its literature. His scholarly work has focused on topics such as the New Testament, textual criticism, the Apostolic Fathers, early Christian apocrypha, the Diatessaron, patristics, early Christian apologists, papyrology and manuscript studies. His primary research interest is pre-Nicene Christian literature in all its varieties, to which he brings a background in classical and Semitic languages, and in the languages of the Christian Orient.
Project
“The Archaeology of the Early Christian Book in the Eastern Mediterranean”
The current standard model of the early Christian book is one in which Christians of the first few centuries preferred the codex to the roll to a degree significantly greater than society in general — if only for writings they regarded as “scripture.” The evidence, however, does not seem to support this hypothesis. Recent scholarly reassessments have not yet been brought to bear on the question, including the more circumspect dating of early Christian manuscripts as well as demographic data. Important too is indirect evidence in early Christian writings for the use of diverse book forms. Moreover, a methodological shift in categorizing this literature is required: Different texts were composed and used in diverse religio-historical settings by various groups with divergent beliefs. “Scriptural,” “apocryphal,” “canonical” remained disputed concepts in this period. This project therefore undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the early Christian book and provides a new synthesis of the evidence.
Christian Schöne
Marcia & Oded Borowski/George A. Barton Research Fellow
Biography
Christian Schöne is a PhD candidate at the University of Cologne. During his studies he focused on methods of archaeological fieldwork and participated in many projects around the Mediterranean. Currently he is completing a dissertation on the economic history and settlement patterns of the ancient Negev metropolis Elusa and its hinterland.
Project
His dissertation project is based on data gathered during excavation and surveywork in and around the ancient city supplemented by additional data from remote sensing and geophysical prospection. During his time at the Albright, he aims to round of his existing data set by gathering data from various archives and libraries in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh.
Beatrice Vaienti
Lydie T. Shufro Summer Research Fellow
PhD Candidate in Digital Humanities at EPFL
Biography
Beatrice Vaienti earned her BS and MS in Architecture and Building Engineering from the University of Bologna. She is currently a PhD student at DHLAB – EPFL and a fellow of the EPFLGlobaLeaders program. Her research combines 4D procedural modeling with a critical analysis of cartographic biases and errors to explore the urban evolution of Jerusalem between 1840 and 1940 through Western cartography.
Project
“Jerusalem 1840-1940: A Genealogy of Cartographic Inventions”
During her time at the Albright, Beatrice will focus on biases and inaccuracies within Western 19th-century maps of Jerusalem, using digital cartometric tools to detect and understand the underlying distortions and copying processes among these historical documents. The study of more than one hundred maps from the period will offer insights into Jerusalem’s depiction by non-local mapmakers, with the opportunity to reflect on the impact of their errors and distortions. Her project aims to trace the genealogy of these maps, identifying the most misrepresented areas and the reasons behind these inaccuracies. By comparing these historical maps with the actual geographical layout of Jerusalem, she aims to bridge the gap between cartographic invention and historical reality, shedding light on the broader implications of these inconsistencies.
