Zainab Bahrani (Arabic: زينب البحراني; born 29 August 1962) is an IraqiAssyriologist and is Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at Columbia University.[2] She was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. In 2019 she was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship; she previously held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. In 2009 she was awarded the James Henry Breasted Prize. Her book The Graven Image demonstrated "a complete overturning of Eurocentric representations of the cultural and artistic legacies of ancient Assyria and Babylonia".
Early life and education
A native of Baghdad, Iraq, she was educated in Europe and the United States. She received her Master of Arts and doctoral degrees (Ph.D. 1989) in art history and archeology from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.[2]
Bahrani has written widely on ancient near eastern art. Her book The Infinite Image was described by Matthew Canepa as a tool for "advocacy of the relevance of ancient Near Eastern art to contemporary art historical discourse, programs, and museums".[8] In Scramble for the Past, edited by Bahrani, she also wrote a chapter which described how Ottoman and European colonial powers used the Assyrian past to meet their own "ideological goals".[9] In reviewing The Graven Image archaeologist Jeremy Tanner described how Bahrani's book demonstrated "a complete overturning of Eurocentric representations of the cultural and artistic legacies of ancient Assyria and Babylonia", compounding the notion that the idea of 'Mesopotamia' itself is a colonial product.[10] Bahrani's book The Ritual Body was reviewed by Carolyn Nakamura, who described it as "an illuminating and theoretically rich consideration of Assyro-Babylonian war and violence".[11]
