2023 NOMINEES FOR ASOR BOARD ELECTIONS
The ASOR 
Trustee Nominations Committee has selected seven highly qualified members to stand for election for four open positions on the Board of Trustees. The Board sets the direction for ASOR and provides oversight for our organization. Among other responsibilities, members of the Board agree to attend two meetings each year, to participate thoughtfully in the governance process, and to contribute financially to ASOR.
There are five candidates running for two openings as Member-elected Trustees for 3-year terms (Theodore Burgh, Patricia Fall, Emily Hammer, Melissa Bailey Kutner, and Kiersten Neumann). There are two candidates for two openings as Institutionally-elected Trustees for 3-year terms (Eric Cline and Jason Ur). All ASOR members are eligible to vote in the Member-elected Trustee Election, while only Institutional Representatives of the 60 ASOR-member schools may vote in the Institutionally-elected Trustee Election.
ASOR will conduct the elections by online ballot, and all members and Institutional Representatives will receive the appropriate ballot(s) via email on or around October 10, 2023. We will send out two reminders, and all ballots must be completed by 12:00 PM Eastern Time on Monday, November 13. If you have difficulties completing the online ballot (once they are distributed), please contact Marta Ostovich at programs@asor.org.
Nominees for Membership-elected Trustees
(two to be elected)
Theodore Burgh
Theodore Burgh is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He holds his degrees from the University of Arizona (M.A./Ph.D.), Howard University (M.A.), and Hampton University (B.A.). His research interests are the archaeology of ancient Israel and the Near East, the Hebrew Bible, archaeomusicology (the study of ancient music culture), the reconstruction of Syro-Palestinian and Near Eastern music culture and cataloging musical artifacts, utilization analysis of Syro-Palestinian sacred and secular space, and ethnomusicology.
Mission Statement: I have been an active ASOR member since 1996 and a part of the membership committee for nearly 20 years. I now serve as Chair of this incredible group. As a trustee, I will continue to bring commitment and experience. Building on existing success, ASOR can expand its services to the Academy generally and to members specifically. For example, as a result of the pandemic, we have demonstrated that we can work and thrive virtually. We should continue these efforts to develop virtual archaeology as a sustained part of our organization. Moreover, we should continue implementing technology (e.g, live streaming, recorded Zoom lectures and papers). The popularity and inclusiveness of Zoom lectures displays the desire and need for this approach in the 21st century. These kinds of venues share the fabulous work of our field with new people and those who previously had little to no access to these invaluable sources. Lastly, I would like to see continued energy with the membership and outreach committee. Efforts with the Friends of ASOR will be essential to maintaining the organization’s future membership and developing inclusivity.
Patricia Fall
Patricia Fall is a Professor in the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC). Prior to her appointment at UNCC, she held positions as Professor of Geography at Arizona State University and Charles La Trobe Professor of Geography at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Pat is an archaeologist and paleoecologist whose research explores human impacts on ancient environments, the influences of climate change on early agrarian societies, and modeling of human-environmental interactions. She has conducted NSF-funded research in the Mediterranean Basin, South Pacific and Caribbean. Pat has directed ASOR-affiliated excavations at Bronze Age Tell el-Hayyat, Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj, and Zahrat adh-Dhra‘ 1, Jordan and Politiko-Troullia, Cyprus. These projects elucidate social and past environmental dynamics underlying the rise of Bronze Age urbanism and document ecological impacts triggered by initial human colonization of islands. She currently directs a collaborative study of climate change and the agricultural responses it engendered around 4500-3500 years ago, stretching from the Levant to Cyprus, Sicily, and Sardinia. Pat has published 4 books and over 90 articles detailing the results of her research.
Mission Statement: I am committed to providing enhanced opportunities for students and scholars to engage in wide-ranging field, lab, and literary research regarding the ancient world. My participation in ASOR has been an important aspect of my entire research career in the greater Mediterranean. I have served on the Committee on Archaeological Research and Policy (CAP) for the last six years, on the Shepard Urgent Action Grant Committee for four years, on CAP’s Fellowship Committee for five years, and contributed to the development of CAP’s Policy on Professional Conduct. For the last two years, I have chaired the Fellowship Committee, which has overseen the application and award process for ASOR’s Student Fieldwork Scholarships (about 250 applicants in the past two years) and Project Research Grants (about 50 applications in the past two years). These programs have expanded in numbers and diversity of applicants, numbers and funding for scholarships and grants, range of research topics, and geographic breadth. I currently chair the ACOR NEH Fellowship Committee, and have served previously on six NSF grant proposal review panels. As a member of the ASOR Board, I look forward to further expansion of ASOR’s support for increasingly diverse student and professional contributions to the exploration of our human heritage.
Emily Hammer
Emily Hammer is Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an anthropological archaeologist interested in the development of urbanism and the history of mobile pastoralism in greater Mesopotamia, including the highland peripheries of the north and the alluvial plains of the south. She has surveyed and excavated in Iraq, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Professionally she is known for her technical expertise in spatial analysis and both quantitative and visual analysis of remote sensing imagery, especially newly-declassified sources of archival imagery (including imagery from U-2 spy planes and Hexagon spy satellites). As a participant in the global collaborative project “LandCover6K,” she works with other historians and archaeologists to reconstruct land use over the last 6000 years across southwest Asia for inclusion in models of long-term climate and anthropogenic land cover change. Emily holds a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University (2012) and a BA both in Mathematics and Classical & Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College (2006).
Mission Statement: ASOR has been central to my professional life from the beginning of graduate school continuing until today. I value the knowledge that I gain and the networks that I build at each annual meeting. In recent years I have contributed to the life of the organization through service on several standing committees, the Committee on Archaeological Research and Policy (CAP, two terms, including a term on the Fellowships Committee) and the Cultural Heritage Committee. I have further had the opportunity to participate in shaping ASOR’s evolving current directions through service on the Ad Hoc Committee on ASOR’s Name and the Ad Hoc Committee for ASOR’s Code of Conduct for Fieldwork Projects. Additionally, I co-chaired the “Landscapes of Settlement in the Ancient Near East” annual meeting session each year from 2015-2022.
ASOR has grown tremendously in the 17 years that I have been a member, and I have been excited to witness it expand to include both a more diverse group of members and scholarship concerned with a broader geographic area. To sustain and capitalize on this growth, ASOR must continue to adapt to meet the sometimes-disparate needs of members pursuing various goals at different career stages, especially as members face ever-changing classroom and research funding environments. As a primarily North American-based organization, we must do more to encourage and support truly equal collaborative partnerships with our local colleagues abroad. We must continue to confront the colonialist legacies of our disciplines, recruit diverse students to our fields, and find creative ways to communicate our research to a broader audience.
Melissa Bailey Kutner
Melissa Bailey Kutner is Assistant Professor in the department of Ancient Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focuses on the late Byzantine economy of Jordan and on the Roman economy more broadly, including issues of standardization and cognitive approaches to value. She has excavated at a variety of sites in Jordan since 2008, and since 2017 has acted as a co-director of the Dhiban Excavation and Development Project. This project investigates long-term occupation at the site of Dhiban in west-central Jordan: how such occupation has waxed and waned in relation to broader regional and political developments and how inhabitants of the site reused and repurposed architecture and features of the landscape. Dr. Kutner focuses especially on the late Byzantine prosperity of the site and its early Islamic transition. She also served as chair of the Archaeology of the Byzantine Near East session at ASOR for six years and has served on the ASOR Board of Trustees for three years.
Mission Statement: Throughout my career as an archaeologist, ASOR has played a central role in supporting my own and my colleagues’ research. In my time on the Board of Trustees so far, I have been excited to see ASOR increase accessibility with its hybrid meeting format, work to address its carbon footprint, and tackle a range of other issues related to access and sustainability. I look forward to seeing ASOR continue to grow in ways that increase its diversity, vibrancy, and relevance. I am interested in spreading awareness of dangers to heritage in ways that also forefront the needs of local communities, and that see archaeological heritage as inextricably linked to human needs and not in opposition to them. I also hope to promote best practices in field schools, including ongoing reflection on teaching methods, curricula, and inclusive policies, and to encourage more diversity among field school participants. Finally, as a new-ish parent of young children, issues of accessibility for parents and caregivers at conferences and in the field is also a growing concern of mine.
Kiersten Neumann
Kiersten Neumann specializes in the art and archaeology of West Asia, with a focus on Assyrian and Achaemenid material culture. She is Curator of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum (ISAC Museum [formerly Oriental Institute Museum]), Research Associate at ISAC, and Lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. In addition to co-editing The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East (2022), she has published numerous articles on sensory experience, ritualized practice, and visual culture, as well as on museum practice, collecting histories, and provenance research. At the ISAC Museum, she has curated such exhibitions as “Joseph Lindon Smith: The Persepolis Paintings” (2022), “Making Sense of Marbles: Roman Sculpture at the OI” (2022–2023), and “Artifacts Also Die” (2023), in addition to the museum’s permanent galleries as part of a complete renovation (2019). She has conducted fieldwork in Turkey (Tell Tayinat) and Greece (Athenian Agora), and collaborates on international museum, art, and cultural heritage projects and exhibitions. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, she received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of British Columbia and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, during which time she also worked at the Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology in Berkeley, ultimately as Associate Curator and Interim Director.
Mission Statement: ASOR has a unique way of inspiring me to continually increase my service to the organization—thanks to not only the rigorous scholarship and interdisciplinarity but also the widespread collegiality. As a long-time participant in annual meetings as a presenter and session chair (since 2008) and member of both the Program Committee (since 2019; Co-chair since 2022)—which I currently represent on the Chairs Coordinating Council—and the Ad Hoc Committee on ASOR’s Name (2020), I’ve witnessed the heartening growth of ASOR’s membership and the thoughtful governance of the members of the Board of Trustees that has made this possible. I would bring to the Board experience from work in both academic and museum spheres; service on grant-awarding, advisory, and acquisitions committees; participation in local and international cultural heritage and community engagement initiatives; mentoring and advising students; and efforts in development, finance, marketing, and public relations.
As a Board Member, I would advocate for, first, increased recognition of museums and associated cultural institutions (and the professionals who bring these spaces to life)—and related public education and outreach—as an integral branch of ASOR and finding ways of expressing this in its programs, projects, and support initiatives. Second would be expanding accessibility, diversity, equity, and ethical standards across the organization. The steps ASOR has made in this respect are strong: the impassioned work of such committees as Early Career Scholars; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Initiative on the Status of Women; and Contested Territories, for example, has and continues to help ASOR evolve in pivotal ways, yet we can do more—for example, we could expand mentoring opportunities for students, increase support for underrepresented groups, and update with more regularity current procedures and guidelines. Third, I would love to bring to the Board my experience working with cultural heritage and diaspora communities and artists, finding ways to expand our partnership and collaboration opportunities with people intimately connected with the regions, histories, and cultures that are at the core of ASOR’s efforts.
Nominees for Institutionally-elected Trustees
(two to be elected):
Eric H. Cline
Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology, the former Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the current Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University, in Washington DC. A National Geographic Explorer, NEH Public Scholar, Getty Scholar, and Fulbright Scholar with degrees from Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, he is an active field archaeologist with more than 30 seasons of excavation and survey experience in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, and the United States, including ten seasons at Megiddo (1994-2014), where he served as co-director before retiring from the project in 2014, and another ten seasons at Tel Kabri, where he currently serves as Co-Director with Assaf Yasur-Landau. He is the author or editor of twenty books and nearly one hundred articles; translations of his books have appeared in nineteen different languages. He has also received the ASOR Service Award (twice), the G. Ernest Wright Publication Award, the Nancy Lapp “Best Popular Book on Archaeology” Award (twice), and was the Keynote Speaker in 2019.
Mission Statement: If memory serves, I have been a member of ASOR for almost 40 years. I first joined as a graduate student in 1984 and have attended the annual meeting almost every year since. I have gone from being the youngest in the room to being one of the oldest and have served in a variety of capacities over the years, including as co-editor of BASOR; an elected member of the Board of Trustees; and a member (and sometimes Chair or VP) of COP, CAP, CAMP, the Program Committee, the Nominations Committee, the Development Committee, and the Executive Committee, among others. As a result, over the years I have had a ring-side seat and have watched ASOR grow ever larger since its long-ago split with AAR and SBL, stretching to cover new areas, both geographically and chronologically, and becoming a fully functioning powerful entity in its own right. I am proud of what has been accomplished, through thick and thin, trials and tribulations, over the years, and look forward to once again helping to serve ASOR’s best interests as a member of the Board of Trustees and to assisting the next generations of scholars achieve continued success in the coming years.
Jason Ur
Jason Ur is Stephen Phillips Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. He specializes in early urbanism, landscape archaeology, and remote sensing, particularly the use of declassified US intelligence imagery. He was trained in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania (BA 1994) and in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago (PhD 2004). He has directed field surveys in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. He is the author of Urbanism and Cultural Landscapes in Northeastern Syria: The Tell Hamoukar Survey, 1999-2001 (2010). Since 2012, he has directed the CAP-affiliated Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey, an archaeological survey in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq. He is also preparing a history of Mesopotamian cities.
Ur joined ASOR as a student member in the late 1990s. He held the ASOR Mesopotamian Fellowship in 2000-2001 and served on the Committee on Mesopotamian Civilization from 2009-2013. He was the plenary speaker at the 2014 ASOR annual meeting. He organized and chaired the Settlement and Society in the Ancient Near East session from 2008-2010. The Archaeology of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq session, which he founded and chaired from 2017-2019, has now been accepted as a Standing Session.
Mission Statement: As a member of ASOR’s Board of Trustees, I will promote its mission to create and disseminate knowledge of the history and culture of the societies of the Near East, past and present. I intend to champion a geographically-inclusive ASOR that involves broader areas of West Asia beyond ASOR’s traditional areas of strength, and a comparative anthropological perspective to complement its culture-historical emphases. I’m particularly interested to amplify new voices in ASOR: those of our research partners in the Middle East, and those of the next generation of scholars in our graduate and undergraduate classrooms. Finally, I hope to advocate for digital methods of research and outreach, with the goal of making ASOR members’ scholarship more accessible to our colleagues, to the public, and to future generations.
