prof. dr. L. (Lidewijde) de Jong

Lidewijde de Jong completed her MA in Archaeology at the University of Amsterdam and her PhD in Classical Archaeology at Stanford University. She was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, a Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies Research Grant, a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship, a Visiting Research Scholarship from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (New York University), an Aspasia Grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, a Digital Humanities Exploratory Project Grant, a Stichting van Moorsel and Rijnierse grant, and recently a VICI grant (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research).

Lidewijde de Jong is an archaeologist of the Near East in the Roman period. Her research focuses on the dynamics of ancient empires and identity formation, and extends to the era of the Hellenistic-Seleucid kings, preceding Roman control, and the period after Rome was replaced by Byzantine and Early Islamic rulers. She adds a bottom-up approach to ancient imperialism by investigating the cultural expressions of local communities. Funerary customs in particular, serve in her work as providing key insights to the formation and renegotiation of local identities in the face of imperial and globalizing forces. Her book The Archaeology of Death in Roman Syria (CUP 2017) addresses the twin problem of fragmentation of archaeological evidence and applying acculturation theories to the diverse cultural landscapes of Roman Syria. Her project MARE zooms in on mortuary ritual and how the personalization of funerary spaces through epigraphy, visual culture, and visibility was inserted in existing funerary beliefs.

She has also worked on Roman-Byzantine Tyre, and post-Assyrian Mesopotamia. She has carried out fieldwork in Greece, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and at present works in Turkey.

She also maintains interests digital approaches to material culture, iconography, and epigraphy. Her project Digital Tombs, supported by the Centre for Digital Humanities and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), develops tool to store, compare, analyze, and share different types of data related to funerary remains from the Hellenistic and Roman Near East.

Recently, she has been part of several initiatives aimed at safeguarding cultural heritage of the Middle East.

For a full CV, see: http://rug.academia.edu/LidewijdeDeJong