Stephanie Rost, Ph.D.
Stephanie Rost is an Assistant Professor in the History Department of Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York. She has earned her BA at the Free University of Berlin, her MA at Vienna University, and her PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (2015). Prior to joining Queensborough Community College faculty, Stephanie Rost was the 2015-2017 postdoctoral fellow at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and the 2017-2019 visiting assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
Stephanie Rost was trained primarily as an archaeologist and anthropologist but has a strong background in ancient languages. She adopts the approach of historical archaeology by drawing on historical and archaeological data in the reconstruction of ancient history. Her research interests focus on the investigation of the organization of early state economies with an emphasis on agricultural systems and political ecology. Her doctoral research was concerned with the technical and social aspects of water management of the late 3rd millennium B.C. southern Mesopotamia as a means to assess the degree of political centralization in early state societies.
Her current research agenda focuses on the reconstruction of the historical geography of late 3rd millennium B.C. southern Mesopotamia to aid the interpretation of the rich data set of economic documents from this period. While these documents have the potential to provide an extraordinarily detailed insight into the organization of this early state economy, they have been underutilized due to a poor understanding of the geographic context in which these economic transactions took place. We lack the archaeological data that would allow us to map the location of production centers, the network of transportation routes, and the movement of goods and services. Since 2018, Stephanie Rost is directing an archaeological field project (“The Umma Survey”) to address this shortcoming by collecting archaeological data of ancient settlements, relict watercourses and ancient landscape features to inform the reconstruction of the geographic context of this early state economy.
