Research Expertise and Interest
digital humanities, intellectual history, Sumerian, cuneiform, Mesopotamia
Research Description
Niek Veldhuis is Professor of Sumerian (cuneiform studies) in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. His primary interests are in the intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia (History of the Mesopotamian Lexical Tradition, 2014) and Sumerian literature (Religion, Literature and Scholarship: The Sumerian Composition Nanše and the Birds, 2004). He is director of the NEH-supported Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts and is a member of the international Oracc Steering Committee, providing tools and standards for digital publication of cuneiform texts to scholars worldwide. Today, his main research focus is on developing computational text analysis scripts (primarily in Jupyter Notebooks) for cuneiform datasets. He received his PhD at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (The Netherlands) in 1997, and came to Berkeley in 2002.