dr. Shiyanthi Thavapalan

Shiyanthi Thavapalan is Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at the Amsterdam Centre for Ancient Studies and Archaeology. Her research on Akkadian technical recipes, ancient colour perception and the history of crafts and technologies in Mesopotamia integrates methodologies in cultural anthropology with philology and material culture studies.

Thavapalan obtained her MA in 2011 and PhD in 2017 (with distinction) in Assyriology from Yale University. Her dissertation, The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia (published with Brill 2020), won the William J. Horwitz Dissertation Prize and The International Association for Assyriology Dissertation Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung (2014-2015), the University of Tübingen (2017), Brown University (2017-2019) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2020-2022). Her NWO Vidi project (2025-2030) examines the relationships between human beings, the material world and technology in Mesopotamia, one of the best-documented, yet understudied civilizations of the ancient world (2000-330 BCE). She serves on the editorial boards of the Colour Turn, Bibliotheca Orientalis and on the Academic Committee of The Netherlands Institute for the Near East.