CONTRIBUTORS
Guillermo Algazeobtained a Ph.D. in Mesopotamian and Near Eastern Archaeology
from the University of Chicago in 1986 , and has taught in the Department of
Anthropology of the University of California, San Diego since 1990. He is interested
in the comparative archaeology of early civilisations and, in particular, in how pristine
states form, and how those states, once arisen, spur the further growth of second-
generation states in their vicinity.
Azzam Alwashleft Iraq in 1978 to escape the Baathist regime, taking with him
impassioned memories of times with his father among the resilient Marsh Arabs that
would inspire a life of environmental activism aimed at restoring, protecting and
preserving the delicate balances within Iraq’s ecosystem. Prompted by the release of a
United Nation’s Environmental Program’s report in 2001 that detailed the desiccation
of the Mesopotamian Marshlands, he and his wife, Dr Suzie Alwash, founded the Eden
Again Project, now Nature Iraq, of which he is director.
Julia M. Asher-Grevehas received a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology, Assyriology
and Classical Archaeology from the University of Basel; she also studied art history and
has co-directed a transdisciplinary research programme for the Swiss National
Foundation of Sciences. She taught as lecturer in gender studies at Hamburg
University, as associate professor and research associate at Harvard University, and
recently at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Frauen in altsumerischer Zeit
( 1985 ), which has recently been chosen by the American Council of Learned Societiesto
be included in the History E-Book Project. She was the co-founder and editor of NIN- Journal of Gender Studies in Antiquity(Styx/Brill) and has published a variety of both
specialised and transdisciplinary articles on women, men, gender, and body and has
just finished a book on goddesses co-authored with Joan G. Westenholz.
Christoph Bachhuberis a Postdoctoral Fellow in Archaeology at the Joukowsky
Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. He has held
fellowships and teaching positions at the British Institute at Ankara and the University
of Oxford, where he completed his doctorate in 2008.xv