Amy Gansell

As a young child, seeing artifacts in the freshly tilled fields of rural Pennsylvania, I became fascinated by the past buried beneath our feet. I wanted to be an astrophysicist so I could travel back in time. Instead I became an Art Historian specializing in ancient Mesopotamia.

Today I am an Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Design at St. John's University, where I teach the first-year global art history survey, as well as courses on ancient and non-Western art, cultural heritage, and museum administration. I received a B.A. in Archaeology from Barnard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University, after which I served in a full-time capacity as the Associate Coordinator for Iraqi Cultural Heritage for the U.S. Department of State, and subsequently held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Emory University's Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. I have received grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARI), and my work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Archaeology, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, and the Journal of Archaeological Science. I am co-editor of Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology (OUP, 2020) and CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions (Brill, 2018). I am presently writing a book on ancient Assyrian queens.