Barış Özdemir is a PhD student in Assyriology. He received his BA with First Class Honours from the University of Oxford, where his thesis focused on the place of so-called exorcists in the administration and economy of the Ur III state. Currently, he intends to continue pursuing the research of state administration and governance, institutions, and sociology in the Ancient Near East, as well as the application of anthropological theory to Assyriology. He is employed in the collation and digital publication of the unpublished Ur III tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection. He cultivates a further, personal interest in the Late Antique and Mediaeval Middle East, specifically in the Hellenistic, Syriac, and Coptic religious and intellectual milieus.