Newswise — Young scholars will get another opportunity to pursue research at the beginning of their careers, thanks to a new three-year post-doctoral fellowship between Cambridge University and the University of Chicago. The fellowship, which will alternate between the schools, was established with a $4 million grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.
At the University of Chicago, the fellowship will be available to Ph.D. graduates from the Humanities and Social Sciences divisions as well as the Divinity School. A similar group of students will be eligible from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
The first Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Research Fellow is Jacob Lauinger, a 2007 Ph.D. graduate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. He said a new world opened up to him when, as a student of classical art and archaeology, he learned about the impact of the ancient Near East on Greek culture.
For Lauinger, the opportunity to study in Cambridge will allow him to pursue two projects: one looking at the emergence and disappearance of a little-known empire in an area that makes up the northern part of what is now Syria; the other, an examination of previously unstudied tablets that document a community that immediately preceded the reign of Hammurabi, author of the famous legal code in Babylonia.
"My interest in the ancient Near East came from a course I took as an undergraduate on the Eastern influences on Greek Art," said Lauinger, who is an Assistant Professor of History at Roanoke College in Salem, Va. "I suddenly got the big picture. Greece was a backwater in what was a much larger ancient world, one that involved the cultures of the Near East."
In order to better understand the Near East, Lauinger learned to read the languages of the region. He came to the University after graduating from Princeton in 1999 with a B.A. in Art History and Archaeology, and he became an Assyriologist and learned to read cuneiform texts.
That led him to explore documents related to the little-known empire for a book he is writing, Inside the Empire of Yamhad: A History of Alalakh in the Old Babylonian Period (scheduled for publication in 2011). The empire, which flourished about 1800-1600 B.C., is not well known because its capital is covered by modern Aleppo and has not been excavated.
One settlement, Alalakh, has been excavated, and Lauinger was an epigrapher there. His book will tell the social, political and economic history of the empire from the perspective of the culture itself. Empires that had conquered Yamhad had written previous accounts.
The book grows from his dissertation and will benefit from scholarly publications and resources available exclusively at Cambridge, he said. Those resources also will benefit his second project, which will make available, for the first time, the contents of 126 unpublished tablets from Adab, which are part of the collection of the Oriental Institute.
The tablets have been at the institute since their excavation more than 100 years ago. "The really exciting thing about doing work on Near Eastern texts is that you get a chance to read something that no modern person has read before. It's not like that in Latin and Greek," Lauinger said.
Adab was an important urban center in Mesopotamia from the Early Dynastic to Old Babylonian period. "I want to see what the city was like before Hammurabi's conquest and determine if, in fact, the legal code was something new or if it relied on material already available in Adab," he said.
The fellowship will provide an important opportunity for young scholars at Chicago and Cambridge and will enhance the interaction between researchers at both universities, said Cathy Cohen, Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and the David and Mary Wilson Green Professor in Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago.
"We are very grateful to the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation for this wonderful support," she said. "This fellowship will recognize early-career scholars of exceptional promise and provide them the time and resources they need for their research efforts, as they turn their dissertation into a book or develop their next research project."
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