Beatrice Baragli is an Assyriologist who is currently working on the first edition of the purification ritual for the king Bīt rimki (“bathhouse”), which will include a comparison with other royal rituals of the ancient Near East. Her interests also include the history of Sumerian literature, rituals, ancient Near Eastern religions with a focus on the role of the sun god Utu/Šamaš, and Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she worked on the Sumerian language of the first millennium BCE. Her dissertation was a critical edition of the Sumerian Kiutu incantations – prayers to the sun god.

beatrice.baragli@gmail.com

Selected publications

2022. Sonnengrüße: Die sumerischen Kiutu-Gebetsbeschwörungen. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

Agnethler, Hannelore and Baragli, Beatrice. 2024: “dumu diĝir-ra-na: The god’s filiation in Mesopotamian incantation literature.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 24, 151–205; https://doi.org/10.1163/15692124-12341346

Jon works on Mesopotamian demonology, exorcistic incantations, and the use of amulets. He completed his PhD at Yale University, with a dissertation titled Namtar: Deity, Demon, Agent of Fate, which examines the roles and nature of a Mesopotamian chthonic figure, Namtar, a sort of grim reaper in Mesopotamian mythology. He is now a junior fellow at the project KFG MagEIA at the University of Würzburg, where he is working on an updated critical edition of the Sumerian and Sumero-Akkadian bilingual zi–pa3 incantations.

jonathan.beltz@yale.edu

Selected publications

2025. “Everyday Magic? Four Sumerian zi … pa incantations on Amulets.” ZA 77, 97–121.

The study of Mesopotamian rituals and ritual texts forms one of the main strands in Céline’s research. She is particularly interested in the textual production of priest-scholars in Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylonia. Ritual texts form a major component of this late corpus, which raises the questions of what these texts are and why they were created at a time when the traditional Babylonian cult’s existence came under serious threat. Céline draws from a variety of disciplines and tools, including philology, Ancient History, Biblical Studies, ritual theory, gender theory, anthropology, sociology, and Digital Humanities.

cdebourse@fas.harvard.edu

Selected publications

2022. Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

2022. “Late Babylonian Temple Ritual Texts with Cultic Commentaries: Aspects of Form and Function.” WZKM 112, 347-365.

Spencer Elliott  is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, and a member of the Research Unit Biblical Studies. His current postdoctoral research project is focused on the early stages of the book of Psalms, when it transformed from individual written prayers to a nascent collection of literature. To illustrate this process, he is working with the prayer materials in the archives from Persian and Hellenistic Uruk, where a similar process of inheriting and transforming traditional prayer literature occurred.  By drawing on ancient examples of scribes gathering and assembling prayers into new compositions and collections, his project connects prayer texts with the communities of writers who wrote it. He has taught courses at Trinity Western University and Jerusalem University College. He is also the author of several articles on the religious and political history of Israel and neighboring cultures.

spencer.elliott@kuleuven.be

Selected publications

Elliott, Spencer. “Is there Brawn in Gilead? The Figure of Esau in the East.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 86 (2024): 450-468.

Elliott, Spencer with Larry Perkins. “The Use of οίκος/οικία in Greek Exodus: An Attempt to Understand Principles of Lexical Variation in Greek Exodus.” Journal of the Septuagint and Cognate Studies 54 (2021): 111-128.

aglenn@fas.harvard.edu

Selected publications

Saki Kikuchi is a postdoctoral fellow in the project CRC 1369 “Cultures of Vigilance” and a member of the Institute of Ancient History at LMU Munich. Her current research project examines the use of divination in political decision-making in the Assyrian Empire and the strategies used to “keep the king’s watch.” To analyse this mechanism, she is working with reports and letters dealing with celestial phenomena, examining the relationship between observing, reporting, and interpreting celestial phenomena, as well as social and geographical communication strategies. Her research interests also include Mesopotamian religion, scholarly tradition, and knowledge transfer. Her dissertation was a comprehensive corpus study of the calendrical divinatory texts called hemerologies, with critical edition.

s.kikuchi@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

Selected publications

2024. Mesopotamische Hemerologien und ihre gesellschaftliche Bedeutung. Dubsar 32. Münster: Zaphon.

Evelyne is an Assistant Professor of the History and Philology of Ancient West Asia at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. Her dissertation (2025, Yale University) presents an up-to-date treatment of the profession of the exorcist (āšipu), one of the most prominent learned religious professionals in the first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia. Her work analyzes the exorcists’ self-presentation in their ritual texts against the backdrop of their varied social realities. Evelyne draws inspiration for her work from anthropological approaches (anthropology of religion, medical anthropology), ritual studies, and phenomenology of sensory experience, and is interested in performance and embodiment. Evelyne founded RITM in 2020.

evelyne.koubkova@gmail.com

selected publications

2024. “The Exorcist’s Purity.” Kaskal 21.

Elizabeth’s work focuses on the experience of ritual in the ancient world, and how we (as modern scholars) can understand the varied roles of ritual texts in political, religious, and social settings.  She has worked especially on ritual texts from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, with a dissertation on the Ishtar rituals from Mari. She uses a source-critical approach to understand the production and function of individual tablets, looking at texts as objects and interrogating the particular ways in which they may have been integrated into ritual performance.

eak324@nyu.edu

Selected publications

2017. “Localized Ištar Goddesses and the Making of Socio-Political Communities: Samsi-Addu’s Eštar Irradan at Mari.” Ash-Sharq 1/1, 55-61.

Yael is a Ph.D. candidate in Assyriology at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (HUJI). Her master thesis focused on the lunar eclipse cultic texts from Late Babylonian Uruk. In her Ph.D. she expands her work on lunar eclipses and their textual cultic tradition, focusing on the changing symbolism of the celestial event in the cult during the first millennium BCE. She is interested in religion, cult, languages, meaning production, textualization, literature, and the interface between ancient and modern.

yael.leokumovich@mail.huji.ac.il

selected publications

tnation@gordonconwell.edu

selected publications