Our Team
Dr Christina Tsouparopoulou, Principal Investigator
Dr Christina Tsouparopoulou is an Assistant Professor in Mesopotamian Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, UKSW. She is also a part-time Lecturer and Honorary Research Fellow at Durham University. She works at the interface between material, visual and textual culture with a strong interest in digital humanities and their application in archaeology and ancient history. She has held research and teaching positions at the University of Helsinki, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the University of Heidelberg, Newcastle University, and the University of Cambridge, where she was joint PI in the project “Memories for Life: Materiality and Memory of Ancient Near Eastern inscribed private objects”, a 4.5-year collaborative project funded by the Swedish Research Council (with Jakob Andersson, Uppsala), which aimed to identify and highlight the personal perspective, materiality and agency in inscribed objects commissioned by private individuals in the ancient Near East throughout three millennia. At Cambridge, she was also PI of the project “Plotting the material flows of commonplace Late Bronze Age cylinder seals in Western Eurasia”, funded through a Marie-Skłowowska Curie Fellowship, looking at the interconnections of societies and the flows of cylinder seals made of faience in the Eastern Mediterranean, Caucasus and the ancient Middle East.
Dr Rafał Solecki, Co-Investigator
Dr Bernhard Schneider, Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr Bernhard Schneider is a Mesopotamian Archaeologist specializing in the sacred landscape of Southern Mesopotamia with fieldwork experience in Austria, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq and Syria. In 2021 he was the field archaeologist of the Chicago expedition to Nippur (Season 21). His PhD thesis (Innsbruck) concerned the archaeological evidence of the temple of Enlil, Ekur, at Nippur from a diachronic perspective. He was holding a post-Doc scholarship granted by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) in 2020, during which he focused on the broader evidence of the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid period, which also led to an upcoming project studying the rural landscape of Southern Babylonia (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions COFUND with NCN Poland) at the University of Wroclaw (2024-25). In 2023 he will publish his first monograph concerning the first millennium BC ziggurat at Nippur.
Salahaddin Ebrahimipour, Research Assistant
Salahaddin Ebrahimipour is a PhD student in archaeology at Eötvös Lóran University (ELTE) in Hungary. His research concentrates on the material culture of Iron Age III in northwestern Iran and northern Mesopotamia, specifically focusing on Mannean and Assyrian archaeology. His expertise also includes professional training in GIS, 3D visualisation, and database management, particularly within the field of archaeology.
Since 2015, Salah has actively engaged in archaeological fieldwork in Iran. In 2019, he was a member of the DAEI (Danish Archaeological Expedition in Iraq), conducting excavations at Gird-i-Gulak in Iraqi Kurdistan.