Introduction

Born to Anglo-German parents, I grew up in continental Europe and west Africa. In 2003 I came to Britain to study classical and ancient Near Eastern languages in Edinburgh, Oxford and London, graduating with a DPhil in Classics from the University of Oxford in 2013. Thinking that I might become a journalist, I got some work experience at the BBC’s French-language African radio station in London and at a German broadsheet, the F.A.Z., in Frankfurt. But my interest in teaching and research prevailed, and my first academic appointment was at SOAS, University of London, where I taught as a substitute for the Professor of Babylonian, A R George, in 2012-13. I returned to Oxford as Junior Research Fellow in Lesser Known Languages and Scripts of the Ancient World at Wolfson College (2013-16), and held a postdoctoral research fellowship awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany, before joining Queen’s in October 2016.