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Head of Department
Eleanor is Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History, with a particular focus on Iraq. She has been the Head of the UCL History department since 2018.
Eleanor joined UCL in 2013 after ten years teaching in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (2004-13) and a varied postdoctoral career in and around the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford (1995-2003). Eleanor's research has three main focal points:
- the social and political contexts of knowledge production in the cuneiform culture of ancient Iraq, five to two thousand years ago;
- the construction of knowledge about ancient Iraq in Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East over the past two centuries;
- and use of open, standards-based online resources for democratising access to knowledge about the ancient Middle East.
With Dr Rozhen Mohammed-Amin (Sulaimani Polytechnic University) and Dr Paul Collins (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford) she runs the Nahrein Network. Working with multiple academic and non-academic partners, it aims to significantly develop the capacity of Middle Eastern universities, museums, archives and cultural heritage sites to foster cultural and economic growth in the region.
PhD supervision
Current supervisees:
- Rahul Raza, "Parthian temple policy: a reassessment based on the cuneiform sources from Babylon"
- Joshua Britton, "Individual agency and cultural interaction during the kārum period in central Anatolia (20th-18th centuries BCE)" (AHRC-LAHP funded)
Recently completed:
- Hélène Maloigne, 'Striking the Imagination through the Eye’: Relating the Archaeology of Mesopotamia to the British Public, 1920–1939' (with Dr Ellen McAdam, Birmingham Museums Trust; AHRC-funded) (2020)
- Melissa Benson, 'Violence in the Behistun Monument: Construction and Cohesion of Achaemenid Imperial Rule under Darius I (522-519 BCE)' (with Dr Lindsay Allen, King's College London; AHRC-LAHP funded) (2019)
- Chaitanya Kanchan, 'Towards an ontology of first-millennium Assyria: interiority in Assyrian texts, 745-630 BC' (with Dr Alex Pillen, Department of Anthropology; ESRC-funded) (2018)
- Sushma Jansari, 'From Megasthenes to Sophytes: a re-examination of literary and numismatic sources for Seleucid-Mauryan relations in British and Indian Scholarship' (2016)
- Jennifer Hicks, 'Hollow archives: bullae as a source for understanding administrative structures in the Seleukid Empire' (2016, with Dr Riet van Bremen)
Major publications
- 2022: Kathem, M., E. Robson and L. Tahan, Cultural Heritage Predation in Iraq: The Sectarian Appropriation of Iraq’s Past, Chatham House Iraq Initiative research paper, Royal Institute of International Affairs. Arabic translation 2022
- 2019: Robson, E. Ancient Knowledge Networks: A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship. UCL Press (open access).
- 2011: K. Radner and E. Robson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture. Oxford University Press.
- 2008: Robson, E. Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: a Social History. Princeton University Press. Arabic translation, 2014. Winner of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize, 2011.
For a full list of publications, see Eleanor's Iris profile.
Grants/projects
- With Dr Rozhen Mohammed-Amin (Sulaimani Polytechnic University) and Dr Paul Collins (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), The Nahrein Network (AHRC Grand Challenges Research Fund, Network Plus, 2017-21; philanthropic gift to UCL, 2021–32)
- With Professor Stephen J Tinney (University of Pennsylvania) and Professor Niek Veldhuis (University of California Berkeley), The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (since 2010)
- With Dr Jonathan Taylor (British Museum), Nimrud: Materialities of Assyrian Knowledge Production (AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact, 2013-15)
- Epigrapher for the Ur Region Archaeology Project at Tell Khaiber (2013-17)
Media appearances
Eleanor is often interviewed by print media (e.g. the Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph) and broadcast media (e.g. BBC, Channel 4) on ISIS/Da'esh's occupation and destruction of cultural heritage sites in northern Iraq, and the consequences for ancient Assyrian archaeological sites such as Nimrud and Nebi Younus.
