End of my first working week!

I might have neglected explicitly saying this, but I got the position of Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki!

So the past few weeks have been very hectic, and this week I’ve spent settling in to academic life.

I’m part of a wider research group called the Centre of Excellence: Ancient Near Eastern Empires (ANEE for short), and I’m working in Team 1 (of three). The group’s goal is exploring social identities across a huge timespan in order to see how they change during different empires. It’s a huge project, and Team 1 is looking into using tools from Digital Humanities (the buzzword of the moment) to investigate this more.

My own project is going to be using these tools to investigate masculinities in texts that have survived which have been written in Akkadian and have been digitised. I’m hoping to see changes and developments of how Mesopotamians thought about ‘being a man’ based on time, place, age, ethnicity, so on and so forth.

(I’m still working on my elevator pitch for my project, so please bear with me)

I am SUPER excited to be part of this amazing team and a group full of lovely and wonderful people, so fingers crossed I get good results!