Nam C. Kim is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the current Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies on its campus. He holds degrees in anthropology (PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago), political science (MA, New York University) and international relations (BA, University of Pennsylvania).
As an anthropological archaeologist, his research deals with early complex societies and the significance of the material past for modern-day stakeholders. He is especially interested in humanity’s global history of organized violence and warfare. Since 2005 he has been conducting archaeological fieldwork in Vietnam at the Co Loa settlement in the Red River Delta. A heavily fortified site located near modern-day Hanoi, Co Loa is connected to Vietnamese legendary accounts and is viewed as an important foundation for Vietnamese culture.
His work has been featured in various podcast interviews and a documentary (on the History Hit website). He has also authored several articles and books. The Origins of Ancient Vietnam (2015) provides a glimpse into the foundations of Vietnamese civilization, as seen through the archaeological record. Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past (2018, co-authored with Marc Kissel) provides a comprehensive view on the origins of war within the history of humanity. It seeks to answer the questions about how far back in time we can see warfare, and whether or not organized violence is somehow innate within our species.
Lynne Lancaster is Professor with the Department of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University, Athens. She holds her degrees from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (B.A. in architecture), Lincoln College (M.A. in Classical Archaeology), and Wolfson College, Oxford University (Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology). Her interests include Roman architecture, construction and technology and she has worked on many of the standing structures in Rome including Trajan’s Markets and the Colosseum, and as architectural consultant at various locations in Italy. She has also conducted surveys of provincial vaulting techniques in Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt, Britain and Greece. Professor Lancaster has published extensively, and her Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome: Innovation in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2005) received the AIA’s 2007 James R. Wiseman Book Award. In 2010/2011 she held the AIA Joukowsky Lecturership.
She is one of the Norton lecturers for the 2023-2024 AIA’s National Lecture Program.
See Lynne Lancaster’s work in the American Journal of Archaeology:
Li Liu is a Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor in Chinese Archeology at Stanford University. Previously she taught archaeology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, for 14 years and was elected as Fellow of Academy of Humanities in Australia. She has a BA in History (Archaeology Major) from Northwest University in China, an MA in Anthropology from Temple University in Philadelphia, and a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. Her research interests include archaeology of early China (Neolithic and Bronze Age), ritual practice in ancient China, cultural interaction between China and other parts of the Old World, domestication of plants and animals in China, development of complex societies and state formation, settlement archaeology, and urbanism.
Lisa J. Lucero (PhD, UCLA, 1994) is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her interests focus on ritual and power, water management, the impact of climate change on society, sustainability in tropical regions, and the Classic Maya. She has been conducting archaeology in Belize for 30 years and has authored seven books and an array of articles and book chapters. Dr. Lucero uses insights from traditional Maya knowledge to promote tropical sustainability, working with UNESCO Mexico and colleagues in Southeast Asia. Prof. Lucero is one of the AIA’s 2022/2023 Joukowsky Lecturers.
Kathleen Lynch is Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Southern Illinois University, and the University of Missouri. She is a specialist in Greek pottery, particularly vase-painting and the social aspects of pottery, and has completed fieldwork in Albania, Greece, and Turkey. She earned her Ph.D. and her M.A. at the University of Virginia, after completing her undergraduate work at Boston University. She has published widely, and has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships for her work. One of Professor Lynch’s main publications is The Symposium in Context: Pottery from a Late Archaic House near the Athenian Agora, published as Hesperia supplement 46, 2011, and the recipient of the 2013 AIA James R. Wiseman Book Award. This volume addresses for the first time a collection of pottery used at symposia that has been found in a domestic context in Athens (rather than a funerary context, which is more usual for such pottery). In the volume Professor Lynch discusses form, function, and context without ignoring the social aspects of Athenian drinking parties as well as other household activities. Prof. Lynch is one of the AIA’s 2022/2023 Norton Lecturers.
Jodi Magness is with the Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism. She holds her degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.), and her areas of expertise are the archaeology of Palestine in the Roman, Byzantine and early Islamic Periods, ancient pottery, ancient synagogues, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Roman army in the East. Professor Magness is currently the Director of the excavations at Huqoq, Israel and has also worked at Yotvata and Masada in Israel, Caesarea Maritima, the Athenian Agora, and ancient Corinth, Greece. She has published widely, was the recipient of the 2008 AIA Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, and was a 2013/2014 AIA Joukowsky Lecturer. Professor Magness is the past president of the AIA.
A course by Jodi Magness, “The Holy Land Revealed” is available on DVD through The Teaching Company’s Great Courses at http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=6220
John (Mac) Marston is Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Director of the Archaeology Program at Boston University. He holds his degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles (Ph.D.) and Washington University, St. Louis, and his research interests are environmental archaeology and paleoethnobotany, sustainability and resilience, agricultural risk management. Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology, stable isotope biogeochemistry, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction. Professor Marston has numerous articles in preparation, and his most recently published volume is Agricultural Sustainability and Environmental Change at Ancient Gordion (University of Pennsylvania Museum Press, 2017).
Lindsey Mazurek is an Assisant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on issues of race, ethnicity, identity, change, and materiality in the Roman Empire. She received a Ph.D. in Art History at Duke University, where she began to study cults of the Egyptian gods in non-Egyptian contexts. Dr. Mazurek wrote her dissertation on sculptures of Isis and Sarapis from Hellenistic and Roman Greece. Since then, she has held positions at the University of Oregon, Bucknell University, and the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her research is inherently interdisciplinary, and draws on a wide array of evidence, methods, and approaches to reframe our understanding of the ancient world. She is a Tsakirgis lecturer for the AIA’s 2023-2024 National Lecture Program.
Dr. Jayur Madhusudan Mehta is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Florida State University. He holds degrees from the University of Alabama (M.A.) and University of North Carolina (B.A.), and earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Tulane University. His research specializes in the study of North American Native Americans, human-environment relationships, and the consequences of French and Spanish colonization in the Gulf South. He is a Stone lecturer for the AIA’s 2023-2024 National Lecture Program.
Lisa Nevett is Professor of Classical Archaeology and Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology with the University of Michigan. She holds her degrees from the University of Cambridge, and her research interests include the archaeology of the Greek world during the first millennium BCE, the Roman world c. 1st century BCE to 4th century CE, material culture as a source for social history, household archaeology, the built environment, and gender archaeology. She is Co-Director of the Olynthos Project, and her most recent publications include An Age of Experiment: Classical Archaeology Transformed (1976-2014) (ed. with J. Whitley, 2018, Cambridge, MacDonald Institute of Archaeology Monograph Series). Professor Nevett was a 2019/2020 AIA Joukowsky Lecturer. She is the Hanfmann lecturer for the AIA’s 2023-2024 National Lecture Program.
