Ballot Archive

28 Mar 2024

Candidate Details

Candidate Name

Laura Selena Wisnom

Academic degrees, honours etc.

MA, MPhil, DPhil (Oxon.)

Profession or occupation

University lecturer

Grounds for election

Selena Wisnom is an Assyriologist and Lecturer in the Heritage of the Middle East at the University of Leicester; earlier she held posts at Oxford and Cambridge. Her publications include ‘Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry’ (Brill, 2020) and ‘The Library of Ancient Wisdom’ (Penguin/University of Chicago Press, 2024). She co-edits ‘The Library of Babylonian Literature’ series (Bloomsbury Academic), which makes the Mesopotamian classics accessible to a broad audience and develops literary studies in the Ancient Near East. As board member of the Centre for Manuscript & Text Cultures (The Queen’s College, Oxford), she helps promote dialogue on materiality and orality between specialists of various pre-modern cultures. Her work ranges across Akkadian and Sumerian history, literature, divination, medicine, and performance. The author of three plays set in Assyria, she works with theatre companies and museums to communicate the relevance of the ancient world.

Signatories

The following Fellows have signed this Blue Paper