Henry Ziegler

I am an interdisciplinary scholar with roots in archaeology and art history whose research covers a broad range of material, visual, and textual cultures from premodern Afroeurasia as well as transhistorical perspectives on constructing the past(s). I have been variously characterized as an Ancient Near Eastern specialist, archaeologist, art historian, comparativist, Classicist, Egyptologist, Mediterraneanist, “material culture guy,” and scholarly “swashbuckler.” Regionally, my interests include Africa (especially the Red Sea and East Africa), Asia (Central and Western), and the Mediterranean (sensu lato). I focus on periods spanning from the death of Alexander to Late Antiquity.

I identify primarily as a multi-/interdisciplinary scholar. I received Bachelor of the Arts degrees in Art History and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies from the Pennsylvania State University in 2018, where I also undertook a Postbaccalaureate Certificate in Ancient Languages with concentrations in Greek and Aramaic the following year. In 2022 I completed a Master of the Arts in Archaeology at the interdisciplinary Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies. Based in my formal training as an archaeologist, art historian, and comparative philologist, I favor synthetic forms of scholarship attentive to theories, models, and methods from a variety of fields across the human sciences. Outside of the disciplines in which I have taken formal training, I engage in particular with methods and theories from anthropology, critical/social theory, museum studies, sound studies, and visual culture studies.

My research investigates questions of materiality, identity, and power. Issues of agency, animacy, animality, and humanism are of central concern to my research, and elephants and their ivory are recurrent objects of my interest. I am deeply preoccupied by the roles of objects in constructing the past(s), including the nature of “archaeological-ness” and the political-economic entanglement of scholarship of the past. Other areas of particular interest include craft and the “decorative arts”; embodiment, affect, and sense/sensoriality; and the material culture of religion and devotion, especially examples of “popular” practice such as votive offerings and magical objects. I frequently adopt a “follow the materials” approach, especially regarding long-distance and transhistorical trade and production patterns, most particularly with reference to ivory. My preoccupation with the role of objects in constructing the past is complemented by a focus on historiography, especially the disciplinary historiography of archaeology and art history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries CE. Attention to issues of historiography and the political economy of scholarship are part and parcel of my scholarly practice, which aims to achieve an informed and rigorous – and thus recursive – understanding of the past through a critical eye toward the epistemic effects of modern and contemporary scholarly production. I am committed to the ethical practice of scholarship and I am interested in expanding the scope of community engagement in the critical study of the material, visual, and textual cultures of the past, present, and future.