Dr Eva Miller

Eva is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL History. Her postdoctoral project explored the ancient Middle East, the modern West, and the relationship between the two, through asking questions about processes of rediscovery, transmission, and reception. She investigates how imagery uncovered in mid-19th century excavations of ancient Assyrian sites in northern Iraq (dating to the 9th-7th cent. BCE) was adapted and 'revived' by European and American artists, architects, politicians, authors, and academics, especially in the United States and Germany. She is interested in the wider intellectual climate that shaped and was shaped by this process, in which newly discovered pasts from Egypt and Iraq wound up being used, by different groups and in different ways, to work out what it meant to be modern and Western, and to chart the supposedly progressive 'rise of civlization'. Her book, Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893–1939 was published with UCL Press in 2024. As part of this project, she has also edited a volume (with Guillemette Crouzet) Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East: Archaeology, Empires, Nations, forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2025.

Increasingly, her research focuses on larger questions about interpreting the past in public culture. She is especially interested in how these interpretations are shaped by museums, of history, art, and natural history.

Eva's background is in the art, history, and languages of ancient Mesopotamia. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford where her thesis investigated representations of enemy punishment in palace art and Akkadian cuneiform texts of the 7th century BCE Assyrian monarch Ashurbanipal. She has previously been a teaching fellow for the ancient Middle East at UCL History, a teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham, and Henri Frankfort Fellow at the Warburg Institute.
 

Notable publications

• Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893–1939. 2024. UCL Press, available open access here.
• Co-editor with Guillemette Crouzet, Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East: Archaeology, Empires, Nations. 2025. Bloomsbury Academic, preorder here.
• 'A New Look for the Jewish Past: Historicism, Authenticity, and Fantasy in E. M. Lilien’s Bible Art'. The Art Bulletin 105, no. 1 (2023): 37–63.
• 'The Dinosaur from 600 BC! Interpreting the Dragon of Babylon, from Excavation into Fringe Science'. 2021. Endeavour. Forthcoming.
• 'From Mesopotamia to the Nebraska State Capitol: Assyrian Revival and New American Meanings'. 2020. Sculpture Journal 29 (1): 65–93.

Teaching

Advanced Seminar: The Universal Museum, the World's Fair, and the Exhibition of Everything, 1800–present

Grants/Projects

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow for the project 'A New Antiquity: Western Reception and Revival of Ancient Assyria in Decorative Arts and Architecture, 1850-1935'