Mehrnoush Soroush
Assistant Professor
Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the College
Mehrnoush Soroush is a landscape archaeologist. Her field is concerned with identifying, documenting, and interpreting the material evidence of human activity between and beyond archaeological sites. Her areas of specialty are landscapes of water management and agriculture, particularly the intersection between urban and water history in the Ancient Near East. She investigates the impacts of sociopolitical shifts, changes in hydraulic and agricultural technologies, and environmental trends on the rise and fall of ancient cities, as well as the resilience or vulnerability of their agricultural economies through time. Her interdisciplinary approach draws on archaeological fieldwork, textual and archival research, geographic information systems and remote sensing, and computational methods.
Her work has been published in Remote Sensing, Human Ecology, and AMIT (Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan). She has also contributed a chapter to The Long Seventh Century: Continuity and Discontinuity in an Age of Transition (Oxford: Peter Lang) and entries to Encyclopaedia Iranica, online edition.
Soroush earned her PhD from New York University at its Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and her MA in architecture from the University of Tehran, Iran. She has worked in the private sector as an architect, cultural heritage management consultant, and product manager.