Members

Julius-Maximilians University of Würzburg
beatrice.baragli@gmail.com

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.

Selected Publications

• 2022. Sonnengrüße: Die sumerischen Kiutu-Gebetsbeschwörungen. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
• 2024. Agnethler, Hannelore and Baragli, Beatrice. “dumu diĝir-ra-na: The god’s filiation in Mesopotamian incantation literature.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 24: 151–205; DOI ↗.
  
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University of Copenhagen
jobe@hum.ku.dk

Jon is currently a postdoctoral researcher working for the project From Catastrophe to Culture: Understanding Epidemics in Ancient Mesopotamia, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. His research specialty is in Mesopotamian demonology, Sumerian and Akkadian incantation texts, and amuletic texts. He completed his PhD at Yale University with a dissertation entitled Namtar: Deity, Demon, Agent of Fate, which examines the roles and nature of a Mesopotamian underworld figure, Namtar, who functioned as a type of “grim reaper” in Mesopotamian mythology. Jon has previously been a junior fellow at the project KFG MagEIA at the University of Würzburg and a Teach at Tübingen Fellow at the University of Tübingen. In addition to his current work on the history of epidemics in Mesopotamia, he is also working on an updated critical edition of the Sumerian and bilingual Sumero-Akkadian zi–pa₃ incantations.

Selected Publications

• In Press. “When You Wish Upon a (Shooting) Star: A Neo-Babylonian Tablet of Astrological Oracle Rituals at Yale.” Altorientalische Forschungen.
• 2025. “The Neo-Babylonian Tablets of the Lawrence Henry Ott Collection in the Yale Babylonian Collection.” Orientalia 94.1, 139–162.
• 2025. “Everyday Magic?: Four Sumerian zi…pa₃ Incantations on Amulets.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 77, 97–121.
  
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Harvard University
cdebourse@fas.harvard.edu

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. She is currently working on her next book project in which she analyses processes of ritual textualization in cuneiform tradition. In this study, she puts the texts at the forefront of investigation, with particular attention to how they exerted agency by reflecting, responding to, and transforming their historical context. This agency of the text relates strongly to historical and religious change, and gained in power and authority towards the end of cuneiform culture. Céline draws from a variety of disciplines and tools, including philology, Ancient History, Biblical Studies, ritual theory, gender theory, anthropology, sociology, and Digital Humanities.

Selected Publications

• 2022. Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
• 2024. Debourse, Céline and Julia Rhyder. “Ritual Textualization in the Hebrew Bible and Late Babylonian Priestly Literature.” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 24, DOI ↗.
  
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KU Leuven
spencer.elliott@kuleuven.be

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.

Selected Publications

• 2026. “RS 24.266: Scribal Creativity in the Making of Ritual at Ugarit.” Maarav 30: 1–40.
• 2025. “Praying from the Past: Ritual Practice and Scribal Imagination in BM 40474 and the Psalms.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 25: 115–141. 
  
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Harvard University
aglenn@fas.harvard.edu

Anna Glenn is a Preceptor in Sumerian at Harvard University. A central research interest of hers concerns the writing, performance, and ritual efficacy of Sumerian divine hymns during the Old Babylonian period of Mesopotamian history (Middle Bronze Age, ca. 2000–1600 BCE). She is currently working on a post-dissertation monograph in which she examines and edits a sub-corpus of Sumerian hymns—namely those labeled in antiquity with the classificatory subscript sergida. This investigation serves as a case study for exploring broader questions about the nature and functions of Old Babylonian Sumerian hymns. She is particularly interested in questions about the social and institutional contexts in which the words of the hymns were written down; the ways in which the hymns’ oral and musical performance functioned within a ritual setting; and, finally, how foregrounding the performative nature of these hymns as liturgical compositions informs our interpretation of their linguistic content.

Selected Publications

• 2018. Glenn, Anna and Jeremiah Peterson. “The Lulal širgida CompositionCBS 12590 (HAV 5, pl. 7, VIII).” Altorientalische Forschungen 45: 168–181.
  
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MU MunichL
s.kikuchi@lrz.uni-muenchen.de

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.

Selected Publications

• 2024. Mesopotamische Hemerologien und ihre gesellschaftliche Bedeutung. Dubsar 32. Münster: Zaphon.
  
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University of Tsukuba
evelyne.koubkova@gmail.com

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.

Selected Publications

• 2024. “The Exorcist’s Purity.” Kaskal 21.
  
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College of the Holy Cross
eak324@nyu.edu

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.

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.
  
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Hebrew University of Jerusalem
yael.leokumovich@mail.huji.ac.il

Yael is a PhD candidate in Assyriology whose research focuses on the Mesopotamian wetlands and their relationship to urban society. She examines how this landscape was conceptualized in cuneiform literary and cultic texts, particularly those produced and transmitted within royal and religious institutions. As part of her dissertation, she investigates the role of reeds in ritual practice and the creation of ritual spaces beyond the urban sphere. Her broader interests include ritual studies, landscape and environment, textualization, and the construction of meaning in Mesopotamian culture. She is an Azrieli Fellow and a member of the ERC project Ancient Mesopotamian Priestly-Scholars in the First Millennium BCE (PI: Uri Gabbay).

Selected Publications

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Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary
tnation@gordonconwell.edu

Dr. Trey (William) Nation is an assistant professor of Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern studies, teaching courses on biblical and related languages, exegesis of biblical text, and electives in ancient Near Eastern studies. Trey has an MDiv and MA in Old Testament from Gordon-Conwell and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University, which he earned while also serving as a Fulbright scholar at the Netherlands Institute for the Ancient Near East at Leiden University. His doctoral dissertation was an investigation into the religion of ancient Assyria and the nature of religion in the ancient Near East, and his current projects include a monograph on the religious world of a group of Assyrian merchants from 1895–1865 BC and a study on Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28.

Selected Publications

• 2024. “Rites for the Dead, Amity for the Living: the Old Assyrian nasbītum Rite and Its Relation to the Old Babylonian kispum.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 24: 80–97.

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Sapienza University of Rome and University of Pennsylvania
gioele.zisa@uniroma1.it
zisa88@sas.upenn.edu

Gioele Zisa is an Assyriologist and cultural anthropologist. He holds a PhD in Assyriology from LMU Munich, where he produced a new edition of the therapies for the restoration of male sexual desire in ancient Mesopotamia. He also earned a second PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Palermo, including a research period at the University of Tehran, where he conducted ethnographic fieldwork on Persian oral storytelling traditions. At the University of Palermo, he served as Adjunct Professor of Cultural Anthropology. He currently works between Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Principal Investigator of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action project Plants in the Ancient Near Eastern Texts (PlANET). The project explores human–plant relationships in first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia, with a particular focus on the religious, ritual, and ideological dimensions of plants. He also directs the project Gardens, Resources, and Environmental Exploitation in the Near East (GREEN) and is co-founder of the project Biodiversity in the Ancient Near East (BioANE). He has published on first-millennium medicine and magic, Sumerian mythology, and constructions of masculinity and male sexuality in Akkadian scholarly and love literature. Through his work on ancient Western Asia, he integrates approaches from cultural anthropology, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.

Selected Publications

• 2021, The Loss of Male Sexual Desire in Ancient Mesopotamia. Nīš libbi Therapies. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter.
• 2021. Ambos, Claus and Zisa, Gioele (eds.), Miti, culti, saperi. Per un’antropologia religiosa della Mesopotamia antica, Palermo.
• 2026. “Plants as Persons: First-Millennium Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Botany”, in S. Di Paolo, G. Zisa (eds.), Plants and Humans in the Ancient Near East: Roots of Multispecies Connections, Münster: Zaphon, pp. 171-209.

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