Dr. Amy Gansell is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Design at St. John’s University, where she serves as the Assistant Department Chair and Coordinator for the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Interdisciplinary Minor. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Gansell held a full-time position with the US Department of State as the Associate Coordinator for Afghan and Iraqi Cultural Heritage. In this capacity, she worked on diplomatic projects to restore and build professional capacity at the Afghan National Museum, the National Museum of Iraq, and the site of Babylon. Dr. Gansell returned to academic life in 2010 as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, after which she taught art history to art and design students at Pratt Institute and the State University of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
Dr. Gansell’s current research focuses on the architecture, art, and artifacts that help to tell the stories of ancient Mesopotamia’s Neo-Assyrian queens (c. 865–612 BCE). Her monograph on this subject is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Dr. Gansell has co-edited CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions (Brill, 2018) and Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2020), and her scholarly essays have appeared in prestigious international journals including the American Journal of Archaeology, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, and the Journal of Archaeological Science. Dr. Gansell’s research and publications have been supported through two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants as well as a grant from The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARI).
Derek Kennet is the Howard E. Hallengren Professor in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf States Archaeology in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. His research areas include the Arabian peninsula, the rise of Islam, economic responses to arid environments, and the interactions between the Arabian peninsula and adjacent regions. He was formerly the resident archaeologist at the National Museum of Ras al-Khaimah in the UAE and spent 25 years at Durham University in the UK before moving to Chicago in 2024. He completed his undergraduate studies at Institute of Archaeology in London and his PhD is from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He has coauthored several books, the most recent of which— Southeast Arabia at the dawn of the second millennium: the Bronze Age communal graves of Qarn al-Harf, Ras al-Khaimah (UAE)— was published in 2025.
Dr. Calvin Mires is a maritime archaeologist and heritage specialist with nearly three decades of global experience documenting, interpreting, and protecting underwater cultural resources. His work bridges archaeology, marine science, and public storytelling, focusing on how underwater cultural heritage can deepen scientific understanding, inspire education, and connect communities to the past. As a Research Associate at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Mires helped establish WHOI’s interdisciplinary field of maritime heritage ecology, which investigates how submerged archaeological sites function as oases for biodiversity and evolve through natural and cultural processes over time. He also serves as a Lead Archaeologist for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), where he helps locate, identify, and excavate downed WWII aircraft to account for, recover, and repatriate missing U.S. service members. A dedicated educator and public communicator, Mires directs field schools, teaches at universities, develops outreach programs, and collaborates with museums, tribal partners, and marine sanctuaries to expand public engagement with underwater cultural heritage. His research has been published in International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, Journal of Maritime Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and Marine Ecology Progress Series. His latest book, Intertidal Shipwrecks: Management of a Historic Resource in an Unmanageable Environment, received the 2025 John R. Lyman Book Award in Nautical Archaeology and Maritime Archaeology Honorable Mention.
Mark Munn is Professor of Ancient Greek History and Archaeology at the Pennsylvania State University. He holds a BA in Classical Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a Junior Fellow of the Center For Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., and a Regular and Associate Member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, leading two Summer Sessions for the ASCSA in Greece with his wife, Dr. Mary Lou Zimmerman Munn. In the field in Greece he has served as Assistant Director of the Southern Argolid Survey, Director of the Dema Tower Excavation, Director of the Skourta Plain Survey Project, and Co-Director with Vassilis Aravantinos and Sharon Gerstel of the Panakton Excavation Project. Most recently Mark has been studying the monuments of Phrygia and Lydia in Turkey. The scope of Mark’s research is the history of classical Greece through its literary and material culture and in its broader Mediterranean context. From texts and archaeological evidence Mark investigates the environmental conditions and ideological formations that motivated social and political action in the Greek world from the early Archaic to the Hellenistic periods, with special interest in the influence that Anatolian civilizations of the Iron Age had on the Greeks. Among other books and articles, he is the author of The School of History: Athens in the Age of Socrates (University of California Press, 2000), and The Mother of the Gods, Athens, and the Tyranny of Asia: A Study of Sovereignty in the Ancient Religion (University of California Press, 2006), “Why History? On the Emergence of Historical Writing” in Ancient Historiography on War and Empire (2017), “Inscriptions from Panakton” Hesperia 2021, “Sophists Between Aristocracy and Democracy” in The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists (2023), “The Phrygian Inscription W-03 on the Arslan Kaya Monument” Kadmos 2024, “The Lydian Origin of the Cult of Attis: A Study of Kingship and Divinity” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 2025, and “Herodotus on the Death of Atys: An Anatolian Heroic Archetype” Journal of Hellenic Studies 2026. He has been the recipient of research grants from the Pew Memorial Trust, the American Philosophical Society, the Packard Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory. In 2026 he received the Class of 1933 Distinction in Humanities Award from the College of the Liberal Arts, Penn State.
Jane Sancinito is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is a specialist in the social and economic history of the ancient Mediterranean world and author of the book, The Reputation of the Roman Merchant (University of Michigan Press, 2024). Her current research focuses on ancient stereotypes and the concept of greed in antiquity. She is also a numismatist, specializing in the coinage of Roman and Byzantine Syria, the iconography of money, and numismatic education.
Matthew A. Sears is a historian of ancient Greece and Rome, specializing in military monuments and commemoration, war and society, and ancient historiography. He publishes widely on Greek and Roman politics, society, and culture, and has bylines in The Washington Post, The Globe & Mail, Maclean’s, and Time Magazine. He holds a PhD in Classics from Cornell University
Dr. Jennifer G. Thum is the Inga Maren Otto Curatorial Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, as well as a Museum Educator for the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. She holds her degrees from Brown University (Ph.D.), University of Oxford, and Barnard College. Her field of research is Egyptology, with specializations in Egyptian royal living-rock stelae, Egyptian bronze “reliquaries”, and the Fayum portraits. Her current publication projects include “Sensing Alterity in the Landscapes of Egyptian Royal Living-Rock Stelae in A Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East (ed. by K. Neumann and A.K. Thomason, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, forthcoming), and several articles for Megiddo VI: The 2010-2014 Seasons (ed. by I. Finkelstein, Tel Aviv University Press, forthcoming).
Emily Van Alst is an assistant professor at Washington State University in the Department of Anthropology. She received her PhD and MA from Indiana University and her BA in anthropology and archaeology from Yale University.
She is currently conducting a research project entitled Inscriptions of the Elk Nation: Interpreting Rock Art through an Indigenous Lens, where she is working with members of the Hehaka Oyate to reinterpret rock art sites in Wyoming and South Dakota with a particular interest in images related to elk (Cervus canadensis). This project braids together ethnohistory, cultural mapping, visiting circles, and rock art research, with community members driving the research questions and objectives. She employs a diachronic framework that bridges ancestral rock art with contemporary landscapes, ceremonies, and Indigenous ontologies.
Her publications focus on Indigenous women’s relationships to rock art in the northern Great Plains and on reclaiming cultural heritage with, by, and for Indigenous and descendant communities through community-directed archaeological research projects. She is the co-editor of Indigenizing Archaeology: Putting Theory into Practice (University Press of Florida) and the series co-editor for Indigenous Archaeology Methods and Practice in the Americas (University of New Mexico Press).
