Wagner College art history professor Sarah Jarmer Scott is co-editor of a book published last month by Cambridge University Press, “Seals and Sealing in the Ancient World: Case Studies from the Near East, Egypt, the Aegean and South Asia.”
The publisher describes the book:
Studies of seals and sealing practices have traditionally investigated aspects of social, political, economic, and ideological systems in ancient societies throughout the Old World. Previously, scholarship has focused on description and documentation, chronology and dynastic histories, administrative function, iconography, and style. More recent studies have emphasized context, production and use, and increasingly, identity, gender, and the social lives of seals, their users, and the artisans who produced them. Using several methodological and theoretical perspectives, this volume presents up-to-date research on seals that is comparative in scope and focus. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach advances our understanding of the significance of an important class of material culture of the ancient world. The volume will serve as an essential resource for scholars, students, and others interested in glyptic studies, seal production and use, and sealing practices in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Ancient South Asia and the Aegean during the 4th-2nd Millennia BCE.
Sarah J. Scott, an associate professor and department chair in Wagner College’s Art, Art History & Film Department, will serve next year as the college’s dean of integrated learning.
Scott completed her bachelor’s degree at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where she majored in art history and archaeology and minored in chemistry. She lived in Manhattan for two years and worked at the Metropolitan of Museum of Art, first in the Objects Conservation Department, then in the Curatorial Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. She earned her Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. Scott joined the faculty of Wagner College in the Fall 2007 semester.
Scott’s area of scholarship is ancient near eastern art. She is particularly engaged with issues surrounding the intersection of art and writing in 4th and early 3rd millennia BCE southern Mesopotamia and how cylinder seal imagery functioned in temple economies. She uses a range of methodologies drawing not only upon art history but also archaeology, semiotics, and Assyriology (the study of ancient near eastern languages and scripts).
Another research concentration of hers is the phenomenon of Assyrian imperial art. She investigates how narrative, both visual and textual, plays a role in the administration and ideology of empire. She is currently working on a digital reconstruction of an Assyrian palace at Nineveh.