Meet some of our instructors!

Tasha Vorderstrasse is the Manager, Continuing Education Program at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago. She received her PhD in Near Eastern archaeology from the University of Chicago in 2004. Her work focuses on understanding the identity of past communities through archaeological and textual evidence as well as the interconnections between different regions. She administers and teaches in the ISAC adult education program, and also does teacher workshops and tours of the ISAC Museum for UChicago students and other groups on a variety of topics from post-colonialism and the ISAC to legal history, medicine, and queens and princesses in the ancient world. Her classes for the ISAC have included Nubian Queens, Red Sea and Indian Ocean Trade, and Frank Lloyd Wright's unrealized plans for Baghdad. She recently curated the ISAC Museum special exhibition Antoin Sevruguin: Past and Present and edited the catalog. In 2015, she was the co-curator of the ISAC Museum special exhibition A Cosmopolitan City: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Old Cairo. She has excavated throughout the Middle East, primarily in Turkey, but was also the co-director of the ISAC excavations at the site of Ambroyi in Armenia.

Brendan Hainline an Egyptologist whose research focuses on diachronic change in the Egyptian language, the Old Kingdom, the development of early writing, and the relationship between Egyptian and the other Afro-Asiatic languages. He wrote his dissertation on linguistic variation in the Pyramid Texts, and he received his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2020.

Brendan Hainline is currently teaching Reading the Pyramid Texts: Introduction to Old Egyptian which starts June 28th. For more information on the class and how to register click here. 

Tine Rassalle received her PhD in Ancient Mediterranean Religions in 2021 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before moving to the US, she studied in Europe, where she obtained a BA and MA in Archaeology of the ancient Near East from Gent University (Belgium) and a BA in Hebrew and Aramaic Languages and Cultures from Leiden University (the Netherlands). Tine has participated in over 20 excavations in Belgium, Portugal, Corsica, Israel, Jordan, and Turkey. She is the field supervisor and staff member of the Byzantine site Horvat Kur in the Galilee and has excavated at Huqoq, an excavation directed by her advisor Prof. Jodi Magness. Tine also has an interest in museum studies, the heritage market, and archaeogaming: the intersection between archaeology and video games.

Tine Rassalle is currently teaching Exploring the Dead Sea Scrolls which starts August 10th. For more information and how to register click here.

Foy Scalf studied Egyptology at the University of Chicago where he wrote a dissertation on a corpus of Demotic funerary papyri dating from the first to second centuries CE. His published work covers a variety of topics including Egyptian grammar, philology, Demotic and hieratic texts, magic, and religion, among others. Since 2007, he has been Head of the Research Archives of the ISAC and since 2013 he has been Head of the ISAC's Integrated Database Project. In 2017, he curated the special exhibition Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt and edited the accompanying catalog. He has regularly taught classes for the ISAC adult education program for the last thirteen years and also lectures in the NELC at UChicago and SOIS at Dominican University. In 2021, he co-authored a study of Demotic ostraca focused on the Ptolemaic Period mortuary industry, The Archive of Thotsutmis, son of Panouphis: Early Ptolemaic Ostraca from Deir el Bahari (O. Edgerton).