Alice Petty received her B.A. from Hampshire College, and holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from The Johns Hopkins University, where she majored in Archaeology and carried minors in both Egyptian Art and Archaeology, and in Akkadian. Her dissertation, Bronze Age Figurines from Umm el-Marra, Syria: Chronology, Visual Analysis, and Function, was recently published with Archaeopress as part of the B.A.R. (British Archaeological Reports) series.
Alice has done curatorial research at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Walters Art Museum. While at the Walters, she joined the Discover Babylon project, an inter-institutional collaboration led by the Federation of American Scientists to create an educational video game for middle-school kids about the origins of writing and literacy in ancient Mesopotamia. She continues to work as a subject matter consultant for the FAS on the latest incarnation of this initiative, which is the development of Medulla, an open source toolset that enables users to manage research and learning in collaborative contextual environments, including virtual worlds.
Alice’s interests include the potential high tech future of the ancient Near East and the use of Assyrian and Babylonian imagery on Iraqi currency, postage stamps and public art. She is teaching Humans and Machines in the Fall and Ancient Empires in the Winter/Spring.