Assistant professor of history and archeologist Tiffany Earley-Spadoni’s research on the rise and fall of near East fortresses is receiving support from funders, including the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been awarded a grant for her research project “Fortified Regional Networks in Urartu and Assyria in the Early 1st Millennium BCE.” This funding, granted under the summer stipend fellowship award, in recognition of her work investigating the strategies used by ancient Near Eastern empires to impose sovereignty upon their massive geographical holdings, creating the largest states that the world had ever known. The award supports her forthcoming (Spring 2023) book, Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado).
Founded by Earley-Spadoni along with Arthur Petrosyan and Boris Gasparyan, both from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, the Vayots Dzor Fortress Landscapes Project has been investigating fortified regional networks in the Yegheghis River valley region of Armenia in their landscape context since 2017.
This prestigious annual funding awarded by the NEH, an independent federal agency and the largest funder of humanities projects in the United States, supports humanities-focused exhibitions, collections, documentaries and scholarly research, as well as curriculum and infrastructure projects. This year $33.17 million was awarded to 247 humanities projects across the country. Only six of these awards were made to universities in Florida, and Earley-Spadoni’s project is the only UCF-based project to be funded this award cycle.
In April, the International Association for Archeological Research in Western and Central Asia invited Earley-Spadoni to give an “Archeology in Action Online Lecture” about her related work on the Vayots Dzor Fortress Landscapes Project. She gave this presentation alongside Arthur Petrosyan at the National Academy in Sciences in Armenia.
Learn more about this year’s National Endowment for the Humanities grant winners.
For more information on Earley-Spadoni’s ongoing research into fortified regional networks of the early first millennium BCE, see the Vayots Dzor Fortress Landscapes Project website.
Earley-Spadoni will be teaching two classes related to her work in Fall 2022: Ancient Near Eastern Societies and History of Mesopotamia. Contact history@ucf.edu or visit the History Department website to learn more.