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Faculty Fellow, 2026 – 2029

Aren Wilson-Wright

Assistant Instructional Professor of Middle Eastern Studies University of Chicago

Biography

Aren Wilson-Wright studies ancient Israel and its neighbors with a focus on religious practice, intercultural contact, and the materiality of writing. The Northwest Semitic languages stand at the center of her research, both as a tool of analysis and as a topic of study in their own right. Wilson-Wright’s first book, Athtart: The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age, argues that the characteristics of deities in the ancient world reflect the everyday practices of their worshippers using the goddess Athtart as a case study. In her second book, Jeremiah’s Egypt: Reflections of the Saite Period in the Book of Jeremiah, she shows that many of the references to Egypt in the Book of Jeremiah reflect the effects of Egyptian imperialism during the Saite period. She is currently working on her third book, ʔ is for *ʔalpu: Alphabetic History Through the Lens of Letter Names. In it, she reconstructs the earliest inferable forms of the alphabetic letter names—those closest to the names the inventor(s) of the alphabet assigned to their new creations in order to better understand the history of the alphabet. Other research projects include the Yale Anchor Bible commentary on the Book of Jeremiah and the development of machine learning tools for the study of Biblical Hebrew.

Project

A sandstone sphinx with Sinaitic hieroglyphs on the right shoulder and base.

Egypt, the Levant, and the Rise of the Alphabet

2026 – 2029