James Burgin
Assistant Professor of Hittitology
- jburgin@uchicago.edu
- (773) 702-5967
- ISAC 319
Research Interests
Hittite Culture; Anatolian Languages
Faculty
Faculty
The scholars leading research and teaching on the ancient world.
About
James Burgin is an Assistant Professor of Hittitology. His research focuses on the administrative and cultural history of the Hittite kingdom. A firm advocate for combining philology and archaeology whenever possible, his first books analyzed the economic, religious, and administrative history of the Hittite Kingdom through its textual and material culture. He is the author of Functional Differentiation in Hittite Festival Texts (Harrassowitz 2019) and the two-volume Studies in Hittite Economic Administration (Harrassowitz 2022).
His current work turns to the development of historiographical techniques in the Ancient Near East. His primary research question is the development of and trajectory of the Hittite Annals, some of the earliest extensive historical texts in the world. This direction represents an outgrowth of the research group "The Hittite Annals: Origins, Purpose, and Afterlife" that he led at the University of Würzburg prior to coming to Chicago. In this group, he and his collaborators incorporated narratological perspectives to compare historiographical texts from different cuneiform cultures. As part of the larger goal of situating these texts in the cuneiform world, James is in the process of producing a comprehensive edition of the Hittite Annal corpus with contextualizing studies. In his future path of research, he is eager to incorporate resources from the digital humanities to continue his investigations into the Hittite language, as well as other ancient languages such as Hurrian and Hieroglyphic Luwian.
James earned his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago. Between his graduation in 2016 and return to Chicago in 2025, he worked on or lead various research projects in Germany. After an initial year at the Corpus der hethitischen Festrituale (HFR) project at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur - Mainz, he spent most of his postdoctoral career in Würzburg, where he and his family lived for eight years, with shorter stays at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Vienna.
Research Projects
Active
Chicago Hittite Dictionary
The Chicago Hittite Dictionary opens access to the earliest preserved Indo-European language. Written in cuneiform on clay tablets from ancient Anatolia, Hittite preserves a remarkable record of…
Select Publications
Books
- James Burgin. Studies in Hittite Economic Administration: A New Edition of the Hittite Palace-Temple Administrative Corpus and Research on Allied Texts Found at Ḫattuša: Volume I: Background, Corpus Overview, Case Studies, Lexical Commentary, and Glossary. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten 70. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2022.
- James Burgin. Studies in Hittite Economic Administration: A New Edition of the Hittite Palace-Temple Administrative Corpus and Research on Allied Texts Found at Ḫattuša: Volume II: Text Editions and Philological Commentary. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten 71. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2022.
- James Burgin. Functional Differentiation in Hittite Festival Texts: An Analysis of the Old Hittite Manuscripts of the KI.LAM Great Assembly. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten 65. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019.
Articles
- James Burgin. “A New Join to the Zalpa Text, or: How Many Homonymies Can One Text Bear?” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 77 (2025): 5–32.
- James Burgin. “Vita and Double Eagle in the Iconography of Hittite Seals.” In Ḫattannaš: A Festschrift in Honor of Theo van den Hout, edited by Petra M. Goedegebuure and Joost Hazenbos, pp. 39–59. Studies in Ancient Cultures 5. Chicago: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago, 2025.
- James Burgin. “How Many Hands? Collaboration and Accountability in Hittite Administrative Texts.” In The Tablets and Their Scribes: The Paleography of Hittite Cuneiform and Writing Practices in Hittite Anatolia: Proceedings of the Second International HFR Symposium, Mainz, 2–4 May 2024, edited by Susanne Görke, Adam Kryszeń, Gerfrid G. Müller, and Charles W. Steitler, pp. 1–33. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten 73. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2025.