Elizabeth Knott

Elizabeth Knott completed her PhD at New York University in 2018 with a dissertation titled “Mari’s Ištar Rituals and the Politics of Divine Multiplicity in the Age of Warring Kings.” She is a former Hagop Kevorkian Curatorial Fellow and Research Associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011–2017) and the co-curator of ‘A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate’ at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (2019–2020).   

Trained to study both textual and visual records of the ancient Near East, Elizabeth’s research area focusses on the role of religion in state formation in the second millennium BCE, including the experience of artworks, the writing of ritual texts, and the naming of deities. As a Postdoctoral Associate, Elizabeth is working on the digitization of seals in the Yale Babylonian Collection and teaching a graduate seminar on the ancient city of Mari and its Old Babylonian period archives.