Cheers to Science!
Bringing out your friendly neighborhood scientists, to meet you in your favorite places
February 15, 2023
6:30 PM- 8:30 PM
Marz Community Brewing Company
3630 S Iron St, Chicago, IL 60609
Meet our speakers:
Seth Richardson
Seth Richardson is a historian of the ancient Near East who works in four different ways. First, his work on the history of Mesopotamia's Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BC) primarily addresses political-economic questions. This extends to problems of infrastructural power, the nature of political subjectivity, and the role of institutional claims on bodies; it also entails work on the specific historical problem of the Fall of Babylon in 1595 BC. Second, he engages with theoretical questions of state sovereignty, about legitimacy, territory, rebellion, membership, and state-society epistemologies. Third, Richardson also works on problems related to the history of violence, including war-and-peace, but also on asymmetric, non-state, informal, symbolic, and community practices of violence. Finally, his fourth area of work is as a generalist-comparativist, working on problems as diverse as liver divination, icons and iconicity, animal personhood, ancestor cult, the legal use of divine emblems, the social location of slavery, food security, a disappearing princess, labor value, and ancient historiography. He is an Associate at the Oriental Institute and the Managing Editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies since 2011. Prior to this, he was Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago since 2003, having earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2002. His work is almost entirely available here:
Sarah Newman
Sarah Newman is an anthropological archaeologist. Her research combines archaeological, historical, and art historical methods and evidence to explore anthropological and environmental issues, including histories of waste and reuse, long-term landscape transformations, and human-animal relationships. Newman primarily conducts research in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mesoamerica and the ancient Maya, but she is also involved in comparative projects to study landscapes, infrastructure, and environment in other parts of the world.
Didi El-Behaedi
Didi is a PhD candidate in Egyptian Archaeology and a National Geographic Explorer. Her dissertation centers on the reconstruction of paleolake and ancient settlement development in the Fayum using remote sensing and machine learning techniques. She was awarded a grant from the National Geographic Society to fund her research and fieldwork in the Fayum Depression.
Didi received her B.A. with Honors in Anthropology (Archaeology) and a minor in Geospatial Technologies from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (2017). Her research interests include understanding ancient Egyptian settlement patterns and ancient landscapes through the lens of remote sensing, GIS, and 3D modeling. She intends to use these technologies to further propel cultural heritage preservation efforts and education initiatives in Egypt.
Didi has conducted archaeological fieldwork at several sites, including in the United States, France, and Egypt (Tell Edfu, Deir el-Bahri, Asasif), worked at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Pottery Residue Lab and interned at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In addition, she has worked as a remote sensing research consultant at NASA Langley Research Center (2016) and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (2017). Most recently, in 2018, she also completed a Space Archaeology internship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.