Zainab Bahrani (Chair)

Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Her research and teaching cover a range of topics around ancient Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean world in antiquity including: image ontologies and philosophies of representation, practices of preservation and restoration, concepts of time and landscape. Alongside ancient art and material culture, her publications examine the history of archaeology’s ties to imperialism and colonialism, museum history, biopolitics and collecting, and technologies of violence in archaeology.

Bahrani’s books include Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia (Routledge, 2001), The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), Rituals of War: the body and violence in Mesopotamia (Zone/MIT Press, 2008) which was awarded the Breasted Book Prize by the American Historical Association, The Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity (Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, 2014) which won the Lionel Trilling Prize, and Mesopotamia: Art and Architecture (Thames and Hudson, 2018). Her books have been translated into Arabic, Turkish and Italian. She has also co-authored books to accompany exhibitions she has co-curated including: Modernism and Iraq (with Nada Shabout, New York, 2009) and Scramble for the Past: a story of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753-1914 (with Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem, Istanbul, 2011). Her new book is War Essays, London: UCL Press, 2024.

Another aspect of her work is in the area of monument preservation, conservation and the politics of cultural heritage. Bahrani has written widely on the destruction of heritage in wars and military occupation in academic journals and in the press, and is the director of two ongoing fieldwork projects in Iraq and Turkey.

Bahrani is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions including awards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from the Getty, Mellon and Kevorkain Foundations, and a 2004 Guggenheim. In 2019 she won an Andrew Carnegie award for her work on the politics of archaeology, Monumental Landscapes: historical environments and human rights. In 2020 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.