Shai Gordin is a historian of the Ancient Near East at the universities of Ariel and Tel Aviv, with a focus on the languages and cultures of ancient Anatolia and first millennium BCE Babylonia
Having received their PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2012. Shia Grdin was a postdoctoral fellow at the Tel Aviv University (2012-2013), the KU Leuven (2013-2014) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2014-2015). In Leuven they were part of the Greater Mesopotamia project (IAP VII/14) where they initiated the development of the Neo-Babylonian Cuneiform Corpus (abbrev. NaBuCCo: http://nabucco.arts.kuleuven.be/) under the direction of Kathleen Abraham and Michael Jursa (Vienna) and published my PhD (Hittite Scribal Circles. Scholarly Tradition and Writing Habits [Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten 59]. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015).
Currently, they are involved in two research projects. One revolves around the patterns of interaction, integration and displacement between foreigners, such as Judeans, Iranians and Egyptians, and the local urban Babylonian elite, as reflected in various Neo-Babylonian private archives from the late first Millennium BCE. It is financed by a 4 year grant from the Israel Science Foundation (Grant no. 674/15). The second project at Tel Aviv university is managed together with Yoram Cohen (Tel Aviv) and Michael Jursa, and deals with the Urukean priestly families of the long sixth century BCE (financed by a grant of the Thyssen Foundation).
