Madadh Richey
Joined Atlas Obscura in 2022
Madadh Richey is an Assistant Professor in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University. Her book, Visions of Gods and Monsters: Divine Combat in Ancient Middle Eastern Art and Society (Oxford University Press, 2027) examines social contexts and functions of divine-combat images in the visual culture of Mesopotamia and the Levant during the Iron Age (ca. 1175–550 BCE).
Madadh is interested in the semiotics of animality, monstrosity, wilderness, and nature, especially as these rubrics have intersected with ancient Middle Eastern art and literature; this includes exploration in the aesthetic paradigms forged by 18th- and 19th-century writers studying and imagining the ancient Middle East. In addition to her visual culture work, Madadh has been active as an epigrapher of late-second- and first-millennium B.C.E. texts in Northwest Semitic languages, with primary publications of newly discovered inscriptions in Aramaic, Hebrew, Phoenician and Punic, and Ugaritic.
