Susan Pollock held positions as professor of Western Asian Archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin and professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. She has long-standing research interests in village, early state, and urban societies in Western Asia and has conducted fieldwork in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. She also researches more recent periods and has worked on sites of the 20th century in and around Berlin. Her research draws on feminist and political economic approaches to the study of the past, with specific attention to processes of subjectivation and the place of commensality in social life. She is the author of Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was (1999), editor of Between Feasts and Daily Meals. Toward an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces (2012), and co-editor (with Reinhard Bernbeck and Kamyar Abdi, 2010) of The 2003 Excavations at Tol-e Baši, Iran: Social Life in a Neolithic Village and Looking Closely. Excavations at Monjukli Depe, Turkmenistan, 2010 – 2014, Volume I (with Reinhard Bernbeck and Birgül Ögüt, 2019).