FOA Webinar: Amy Gansell - American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)

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FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS

The Queens of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace: Beauty, Power, and Presence in the Neo-Assyrian World, c. 865–705 BCE

Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on May 14, 2025, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Amy Gansell. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

Nearly three thousand years ago, at the ancient site of Nimrud (near modern Mosul, Iraq), a succession of ten Neo-Assyrian kings reigned in collaboration with their queens from the magnificence of the Northwest Palace, the seat of the empire and center of their world. Too often overshadowed by the well documented legacy of Neo-Assyrian kings, this presentation illuminates the queens who reigned with them. Dr. Gansell focuses on the queens of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace (c. 865–705 BCE) because it is here, in the late 1980s, that Iraqi archaeologists uncovered their partially intact royal tombs. The tombs contained heaps of precious jewelry and regalia, along with cuneiform inscriptions, and even some skeletal remains. Putting together these artifacts of death and connecting them to the art, architecture, and written record of the palace, we can learn about the names, lives, appearance, royal duties, and religious roles of the queens. Piece by piece, and layer by layer, across about 150 years of evidence, we discover the beauty, power, and presence of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace queens in life, death, and for eternity.

Although research into the deep past inevitably reveals gaps in our knowledge and raises unanswerable questions, what we don’t know can also stimulate curiosity and creativity, which Dr. Gansell applies in offering a virtually rendered snapshot of the world of the queens of Nimrud’s Northwest Palace. If we just said “we don’t know” to all our questions about the queens, soon we’d be left just talking about the kings, and the story of the Neo-Assyrian empire would remain a conventional history of a man’s world.

Dr. Amy Gansell is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Design at St. John’s University, where she serves as the Assistant Department Chair and Coordinator for the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Interdisciplinary Minor. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Gansell held a full-time position with the US Department of State as the Associate Coordinator for Afghan and Iraqi Cultural Heritage. In this capacity, she worked on diplomatic projects to restore and build professional capacity at the Afghan National Museum, the National Museum of Iraq, and the site of Babylon. Dr. Gansell returned to academic life in 2010 as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University’s Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, after which she taught art history to art and design students at Pratt Institute and the State University of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).

Dr. Gansell’s current research focuses on the architecture, art, and artifacts that help to tell the stories of ancient Mesopotamia’s Neo-Assyrian queens (c. 865–612 BCE). Her monograph on this subject is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Dr. Gansell has co-edited CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions (Brill, 2018) and Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2020), and her scholarly essays have appeared in prestigious international journals including the American Journal of Archaeology, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, and the Journal of Archaeological Science. Dr. Gansell’s research and publications have been supported through two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants as well as a grant from The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARI).