Lecturer I - Postdoc
About
Katherine Burge is an archaeologist specializing in the ancient Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. She is the curator of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology’s new permanent gallery, The Byzantine and Islamic Worlds: 400–1800, which opened in August 2026.
Her research examines urban societies, socioeconomic organization, and systems of information recording in Bronze and Iron Age Mesopotamia. Drawing on archaeological, visual, and textual evidence, she investigates how administrative practices and material technologies structured economic and social relationships and mediated the circulation of goods, people, and information. She has conducted archaeological fieldwork at sites in Turkey, Kurdistan, and Iraq.
Her broader interests concern the modern histories of archaeology and cultural heritage in the Middle East, particularly how colonialism and internationalism have shaped the production of archaeological knowledge, the formation of museum collections, and approaches to heritage preservation and policy.
She is also interested in the modern reception and afterlives of Mesopotamian visual and material culture, particularly the ways ancient objects, images, and ideas about Mesopotamia have been reinterpreted, appropriated, and given new meanings in modern cultural, artistic, and political contexts.
