The scholars and professionals advancing our research and collections.
Art History; Archaeology; Sensory Studies; Ritual; Assyria; Persia; Arabian Peninsula; Museum Studies; Provenance Research; Cultural Heritage Preservation; Contemporary Art
Kiersten Neumann is an art historian, archaeologist, curator, and educator specializing in ancient West Asia, with a focus on Assyria and Persia and their connections with Arabia. Her work explores sensory experience, ritualized practice, and visual culture, as well as museum practice, collecting histories, provenance, and cultural heritage preservation. She has curated numerous exhibitions at the ISAC Museum, including most recently Artifacts Also Die (2023) and Megiddo: A City Unearthed, A Past Imagined (2025–26), and the reinstallation of the museum’s permanent galleries (2019). She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East (2022) and Scribal Worlds: Scholarship and Classification in Cuneiform Cultures (2026). She has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Turkey (Tell Tayinat) and Greece (Athenian Agora), and is currently part of the Nineveh East Project, a collaboration between the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) and ISAC. She also collaborates on international museum, art, and cultural heritage projects, and works with diaspora artists and communities to advocate for and renew engagement with the heritage of West Asia. In 2024 she joined the Board of Trustees of the American Society of Overseas Research.
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Miscellaneous Publications
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Miscellaneous Publications
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News & Notes 261
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News & Notes 254
Edited Volumes
Articles
Where is this artifact from? Who does it belong to? How did it get here? Who’s telling its story? Critical inquiry into the practice and politics of museums has reached a new zenith in contemporary discourse. From discussions of acquisition and repatriation to provenience (archaeological findspot) and provenance (an object’s ownership history) and the ethics of curation and modes of display, museum and art professionals—and the general public alike—actively deliberate the concept of museums and these institutions' responsibilities toward the collections they steward. This course explores the early history of museums and collecting practices and their impact on the field today, with a focus on cultural heritage collections from West Asia and North Africa. [Also taught Winter 2023 and Winter 2024]
What is the “ancient Near East”? What is its visual culture? This course explores the ancient art and architecture of the regions of West Asia and North Africa, that is to say, of Mesopotamia, Syro-Anatolia, the Levant, Persia, and Egypt dating from the fourth through the first millennium BCE (3500 to 330 BCE). Such a corpus includes palaces, temples, and ziggurats, as well as carved reliefs, royal images, votive statues, cylinder seals, and cuneiform tablets crafted of clay, rock, semi-precious stones, metals, ivory, and pigments. In addition to stylistic analysis, we will consider the practices by which this corpus was made, the cultural value of the raw material, life histories and modes of circulation, interactive and experiential potential, significance within the larger social and political climate, and the reception and treatment of these works of art in a modern context, including the museum space. [Also taught Winter 2022]
