Photographs of Dura-Europos: 1922 – 2022 and Onward

Prof. Jen Baird is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research has focussed on the site of Dura-Europos, including extensive work in Yale University Art Gallery’s Dura archive and archaeological fieldwork at Dura before the start of the Syrian conflict. That work centered initially on the many preserved houses of the site, the topic of her PhD and first monograph (The Inner Lives of Ancient Houses, Oxford University Press, 2014). She has also written on a range of topics related to Dura, including archaeological photography and ancient graffiti. Among her recent publications are Dura-Europos(Bloomsbury, 2018), and a co-edited special issue of The Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies entitled Remembering Roman Syria. 

Lisa R. Brody, Associate Curator of Ancient Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, received her B.A. from Yale and her PH.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She has excavated around the Mediterranean and on Yale’s campus, and her publications include Aphrodisias III: The Aphrodite of Aphrodisias. In 2011 she cocurated Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, which was on view at the McMullen Museum at Boston College and at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, and she coedited the accompanying book. She cocurated Roman in the Provinces: Art on the Periphery of Empire and coedited the exhibition catalogue and is currently working on several projects with the archives from the Dura-Europos and Gerasa excavations held at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Anne Hunnell Chen is a postdoctoral associate in Yale’s interdisciplinary ARCHAIA Program for the Study of Ancient and Premodern Cultures and Societies. Dr. Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally-connected Roman world, and is committed to exploring how low-barrier Linked Open Useable Data (LOUD) can be harnessed not only to provide more equitable access to archaeological data in the digital realm, but also to empower stakeholder audiences as collaborative curators. She is the founder and director of the Yale Digital Dura-Europos Archive (YDEA), an archaeological data accessibility project whose documentation efforts are aimed at sharing-out workflows that help to overcome disciplinary data silos and work to dislodge enduring impacts of colonialism. She serves as the Annotations Activity co-coordinator for the international Pelagios Network, and is an historical consultant for the Virtual Center for Late Antiquity (VCLA). Dr. Chen has published on Roman, Persian, and Digital Humanities topics, and has taught equally wide-ranging coursework. 

Dr. Nichole Sheldrick is Senior Research Associate in Digital Archaeology for the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project at the University of Leicester, in collaboration with the Universities of Oxford and Durham and funded by the Arcadia Fund. Her current research focuses on the archaeology and heritage of ancient North Africa, as well as on investigating and developing methods for the application of Automatic Change Detection of satellite imagery to heritage management and protection. Following the completion of her doctorate in archaeology at the University of Oxford, Nichole also worked for the EAMENA project as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Oxford from 2015–2020, before taking on the role of Training Manager for Tunisia and Libya for the British Council’s Cultural Protection Fund project “Training in Endangered Archaeology Methodology with Middle East and North African Heritage Stakeholders” at Leicester. Since 2012 she has taken part in archaeological excavation and survey projects in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt, and previously worked for several years in the commercial archaeology sector in Ontario, Canada.