Dr. Céline Debourse, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
A Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins (PSCO) colloquium lecture. Remote attendance via Zoom (email pscoseminar@sas.upenn.edu for the Zoom link).
Abstract
“Céline Debourse is Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is an Assyriologist specializing in the languages, history, and religion of Babylonia during the first millennium BCE. In her first book, Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022), she studies the so-called New Year Festival texts as part of the cuneiform priestly writings contextualized in Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian rule. In her current research, she continues to explore aspects of ritual and ritual textuality from Late Babylonian Priestly Literature, with a focus on the transformation (‘end’) of cuneiform culture. Among her works in progress are two monographs, respectively titled Rethinking Ritual: Mesopotamian Ritual in Text and Context, and Babylon Not Beyond Cuneiform: Reimagining the End of Culture. Her research draws on a broad spectrum of methodologies and disciplines, from philology and history to anthropology, cultural criticism and literary studies, to the application of sociological and ritual theories. She furthermore aims to embed Babylonian life in a wider Near Eastern history and to foster dialogue between Assyriology and other disciplines.”