Studies in Premodern Sciences in Memory of Noel M. Swerdlow

Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emerita in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology and the Office for the History of Science and Technology. She is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and winner of the John Frederick Lewis Award for Babylonian Horoscopes (American Philosophical Society, 1998). Recent publications are Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016, 2020), Hellenistic Astronomy: The Science in Its Contexts (co-edited with Alan C. Bowen, Brill, 2020), which received the Choice Award as Outstanding Academic Title 2020), and Worldmaking and Cuneiform Antiquity: An Anthropology of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Rochberg is an Assyriologist and historian of science. Her work has consistently brought a cultural-historical perspective to the analysis of ancient science, culminating in her proposal to add the anthropology of science to currently existing history,  philosophy, and sociology of science methods.