CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures
Cécile Michel receives Honorary Doctorate from Universität Hamburg
28 September 2023
Photo: Karsten Helmholz
Cécile Michel (left) receives the certificate from Silke Segler-Meßner (right).
The Faculty of Humanities at Universität Hamburg has awarded Cécile Michel an honorary doctorate. Michel has been an internationally respected authority in the field of Assyriology for many years. At the CSMC she is active in several important roles.
Michel received the certificate from the hands of the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Universität Hamburg, Silke Segler-Meßner. The laudation was given by Michael Friedrich, former director of the CSMC. In addition to Michel’s numerous academic achievements – she has authored or co-edited 37 books in her career, as well as over 500 articles – Friedrich also emphasised her extraordinary achievements in teaching and her highly successful outreach activities. An impressive example of this is Thus Speaks Taram-Kubi, a documentary which she co-produced, which has been translated into several languages and won numerous awards.
At CSMC, Michel has been active in several key roles for many years. She is leading two research projects, one on ‘Archives and Literacy in 2nd Millennium Assyrian Manuscript Culture’, the other on ‘Reading Closed Cuneiform Tablets Using High-Resolution Computed Tomography’. The latter is a joint project with physicist Christian Schroer and computer scientist Stephan Olbrich and led to the development of the ENCI machine recently commissioned at the CSMC. With this device, sealed cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia can be read in a completely non-invasive way. The machine is portable, making it possible to employ it in museums and archives around the world.
Moreover, Michel is also the spokesperson for the Cluster's Ethics Working Group and chair the ethics committee, which advises researchers both at CSMC and elsewhere on how to responsibly deal with written artefacts, people involved in the research process, and research data.
Part of the ceremony was a lecture by Nicole Brisch, the new professor of Assyriology at Universität Hamburg. The event took place on the night before the opening of ‘Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives’.
An interview with Cécile Michel is available here:
