Associate Research Scientist, Archaeology; Intermittent Lecturer, Middle East Studies
About
Geoff Emberling is an associate research scientist at the Kelsey Museum and currently directs archaeological research on ancient Kush at Jebel Barkal in northern Sudan.
He received a BA in anthropology from Harvard and a PhD in anthropology and Near Eastern studies from the University of Michigan with a dissertation on ethnicity in early Mesopotamia. He has previously held positions as lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, assistant curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and as museum director and chief curator at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
His research interests include comparative perspectives on ancient cities, states, empires, and ethnicity with a particular focus on ancient cultures across the Middle East and North Africa. He has also written on the politics of archaeological practice and museum display.
His archaeological field experience spans much of the Middle East and North Africa. From 1998 to 2004 he directed excavations at Tell Brak, a site in northeastern Syria that contains the remains of one of the earliest and largest Mesopotamian cities. More recently, he directed salvage excavations in the 4th Cataract of the Nile in northern Sudan in 2007 and 2008, and at El-Kurru in northern Sudan from 2013 to 2018.
He is increasingly committed to developing fully collaborative archaeological field projects, with equal representation of Sudanese and foreign staff, and extensive engagement with local communities.
In addition to archaeological research, he has also curated and directed installation of numerous museum exhibitions, including the reinstallation of the Ancient Middle East gallery at the Detroit Institute of Arts and, most recently, the exhibition Graffiti as Devotion along the Nile at the Kelsey (2019–2020, co-curated with Suzanne Davis).
