Professor Dr Nicole Brisch

Projects

Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ (2019–2025)

• 2023–2025: Project Lead of RFE21:
  Archival Practices in Ancient Iraq

Research Interests and Activities

Nicole Brisch is an Assyriologist and Sumerologist. Her research interests include Sumerian literature, the socio-economic history of the Ur III period (ca. 2100–2000 BCE), and Mesopotamian religion. She is the author of Tradition and the Poetics of Innovation: Sumerian Court Literature of the Larsa Dynasty (c. 2003–1763 BCE) (2007), the editor of Religion and Power: Divine Kingship in the Ancient World and Beyond (2008, 2nd printing 2012), and the co-editor of Women and Religion in the Ancient Near East and Asia (with Fumi-Karahashi, 2023). From 2019–2022, she was the PI for the project Hidden Treasures: the Cuneiform Tablet Collection in the National Museum of Denmark, a collaboration between the museum and the University of Copenhagen. In 2023, she joined the faculty of University of Hamburg as a professor, where she is tasked with opening Assyriology as a study programme. She is currently working on a temple archive from ancient Iraq, in which food offerings to the gods were administered and re-distributed to temple officials in the city of Nippur.

CV

Education

• MA in Assyriology (Freie Universität Berlin), 1996
• PhD, Near Eastern Studies (University of Michigan), 2003

Academic Career

• 2023–present: Universitätsprofessorin, University of Hamburg
• 2013–2023 Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen
• 2009–2012 University Lecturer, University of Cambridge, UK
• 2008–2009 Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, Freie Universität Berlin
• 2007–2008 Lecturer, University of Michigan
• 2006–2007 Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Chicago
• 2004–2006 Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell University
• 2003–2004 Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan

Awards and Distinctions

• 2019 Einar Hansens Forskningspris
• 2019–2020 Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study / Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin