As we begin the semester, we're highlighting Bryn Mawr's newest faculty members. The College supports faculty excellence in both research and teaching.
Rocco Palermo, an assistant professor of classical and Near Eastern archaeology, examines the long-term human-environment interactions embodied in the spatial organization of large-scale, global empires, with a focus on South-West Asia from the Iron Age to the Roman period. His research draws on different sets of data: from survey records to excavation evidence, from GIS-based analysis to paleo-environmental data, and to historical and textual documents. He specifically focuses on the role of rural and non-urban communities within the far-flung world of pre-modern empires.
From 2021 to 2023 Palermo was a researcher at the University of Pisa, where he investigated the correlation between mutated environmental conditions and settlement transformations in Southwest Asia in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. From 2017 to 2021 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and PI of the project "Beyond the Rivers of Babylon: Settlements and Landscapes in Hellenistic Mesopotamia," funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
Palermo has been involved in, co-directed, and directed several archaeological projects in Italy, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Oman, Iraq, and Arctic Canada. Since 2022, he has been the director of the Girdi Matrab Archaeological Project (GMAP) in the plain of Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan.
Palermo's first book, On the Edge of Empires. North Mesopotamia During the Roman Period, was published by Routledge in 2019.