Bio

Eleanor Robson, FBA (born 1969) is a British Assyriologist and academic. She is Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History at University College London. She is a former chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq and a Quondam fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Robson was born in 1969. In 1990, she graduated with a BSc in mathematics from the University of Warwick. In 1995, she received a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree from the University of Oxford for a thesis titled "Old Babylonian coefficient lists and the wider context of mathematics in ancient Mesopotamia 2100-1600 BC She was a British Academy postdoctoral research fellow from 1997 to 2000 and then a post-doctoral research fellow at All Souls College from 2000 to 2003, associated with the Faculty of Oriental Studies. From 2004 to 2013 Robson was based at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Robson is the author or co-author of several books on Mesopotamian culture and the history of mathematics. In 2003, she won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for her work on Plimpton 322, a clay tablet of Babylonian mathematics; contrary to previous theories according to which this tablet was of number theoretic character or was trigonometric table, Robson showed that it could have been a collection of school exercises in solving right-triangle problems. She has also been widely quoted for her criticism of the U.S. government's failure to prevent looting at the National Museum of Iraq during the Iraq War in 2003. Robson has received funding from the AHRC for the Nahrein Network. Robson was the chair of the Council for the British Institute for the Study of Iraq from 2012 to 2017.