Avary Taylor

Avary R. Taylor is an interdisciplinary scholar of the ancient Near East. His primary research engages materiality studies and environmental humanities to explore how relational, affective forces—such as people, objects, architecture, and weather—shaped identity and power in Assyria during the second and first millennia BCE. He is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in Archaia: The Yale Program for the Study of Global Antiquity and a Lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations. Prior to this, he held a postdoctoral appointment at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (2023–2025). He received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Johns Hopkins University in 2023.

His in-progress first book, The Lives of Assyrian Things, adopts an object-oriented approach to the socio-material histories of the Northwest Palace at Nimrud (Iraqi Kurdistan) from the ninth century through the Hellenistic period. Foregrounding continuity, transformation, and entanglement, the book traces the palace’s shifting relationships among human and nonhuman interlocutors across centuries. It transcends historical periodizations, anthropocentric frameworks, and disciplinary silos to critically expand the prevailing emphasis on the reign of King Ashurnasirpal II. Continuing his focus on the indivisibility of human and nonhuman forces, his future second book will explore ancient creative responses to large-scale environmental transformations during the Late Bronze and early Iron Ages through a feminist ecocritical lens.

As a Postdoctoral Associate in Archaia, Taylor is building upon recent discoveries of pigments and metals on Assyrian reliefs and cylinder seals through ongoing collaborations with the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage and the Babylonian Collection. He is conducting the first systematic study of pigments and metals on cylinder seals, focusing on examples in the Babylonian Collection. He is also continuing cross-collection scientific imaging of Assyrian reliefs in Northeastern U.S. institutions.

Taylor has taught at several universities, offering courses on ancient Near Eastern art, architecture, and languages, as well as thematic, interregional seminars such as “Art and the Environment in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean” and “The Archaeology of Gender in the Near East, Egypt, and the Aegean.” His teaching often integrates local collections and emphasizes direct engagement with material culture.