About: Saana Svärd

Saana Svärd (born 1977) is a Finnish Assyriologist, serving since 2018 as Associate Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies in the Faculty of Arts and the University of Helsinki. She is known as an expert on the cultural history of the ancient Near East, most notably the Neo-Assyrian Empire, social and political power relations, and ancient concepts of gender, but also in the field of language technology and digital humanities. Most recently, in 2017, she wrote together with Charles Halton the anthology Women's Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Anthology of the Earliest Female Author (Cambridge University Press).