Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) is a center for advanced scholarly research and graduate education that cultivates comparative and connective investigations of the ancient world from the western Mediterranean to China. It is a discrete entity within New York University, independent of any other school or department of the university, with its own endowment and its own board of trustees. ISAW was founded in 2006 with funding from the Leon Levy Foundation, and is housed in separate facilities on East 84th Street in Manhattan. The Institute features doctoral and postdoctoral programs, with the aim of training a new generation of scholars who will enter the global academic community and become intellectual leaders. Its faculty conduct historical, archaeological, socio-cultural and linguistics research at the cutting edge of scholarship in ancient studies.

ISAW intends to curate and mount a series of exhibitions. The first of these is "Wine, Worship, and Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani", which was exhibited in New York in the spring of 2008, and then went on tour. The second is The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000 – 3500 BC, November 11, 2009 – April 25, 2010.

A key component of the mission of ISAW is to develop a working library covering the full range of relevant fields. As well as providing coverage across a wide range of subjects, the library aims to develop strengths in areas otherwise currently poorly represented in New York area libraries. ISAW also aims to play an active role in developing and providing access to electronic resources for the ancient world. As a central feature of this effort, the Ancient World Digital Library will formulate, fund, and sustain a digital collection of the most important research materials for the use of the general scholarly community. It will constitute a collection of digital material of the highest quality and usefulness to scholars working within the cross-boundary, interdisciplinary, synchronic, and diachronic fields of study within ISAW’s mandate. The AWDL will function in close cooperation with other ISAW initiatives such as Backstop (ISAW’s project to facilitate the preservation and long-term maintenance of born-digital scholarly works for ancient studies), our planned Ancient World Image Bank (AWIB), and our initiative to identify, curate and create high quality MARC records for a broad range of scholarly material digitized elsewhere.

The Director of ISAW is Roger Bagnall.