Jacob Dahl is awarded a Full Professorship in the 2017 Recognition of Distinction exercise

Professor Jacob Dahl took up the Associate Professorship in Assyriology, the study of the ancient written cultures of Mesopotamia at Oxford in October 2008. Before arriving in Oxford Dahl studied Assyriology in his native Copenhagen, Denmark; attended UCLA for his PhD, for which he received a full scholarship from the Danish government. Dahl was subsequently appointed to a 2-year post-doc in Paris with the CNRS and then to 3 years of post-doc positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin the last 12 months concurrently with a part-time lectureship at the Free University, Berlin.

Dahl's Recognition of Distinction is well deserved as he has created a complete online corpus of the so-called proto-Elamite texts (c. 3200-2900 BC, with a corpus of ca. 1700 texts), which is freely available to all, anywhere. He has also published a range of articles on diverse topics relating to this writing system. His research on proto-Elamite has caught the attention of both international and local Iranian news media. Dahl is also conducting research in other areas of cuneiform studies, publishing widely on the Ur III period (c. 2100-2000 BC), and he has contributed significantly to building a coherent and well structured online dataset of these texts. Dahl is also leading international efforts at digitising and disseminating the form and content of the endangered shared cultural heritage represented by cuneiform tablets (as a co-PI of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative), and he has led the development of new and innovative data capture methods.

To learn more about Professor Dahl's work watch Open Data in the Humaities and listen to an interview with abcnews.