Norman Yoffee, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, will deliver the 2011 Grace Elizabeth Shallit Memorial Lecture at Brigham Young Univeristy Friday, Sept. 16, at 3 p.m. in the Harold B. Lee Library Auditorium.
His lecture, “The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations: New Perspectives,” is hosted by BYU’s Anthropology Department. Admission is free and the public is welcome.
Yoffee’s primary areas of study include Assyriology (Mesopotamian studies), especially law and economics in the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000-1600 B.C.), and social evolutionary theory in anthropology, particularly the rise and fall of ancient states in comparative perspective.
He retired from the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Anthropology at the University of Michigan in 2011. He is an adjunct professor at the Department of Anthropology at Nevada, Las Vegas and the University of New Mexico. He is also a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
Two of his most recent books include “Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations” (2005) and “Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire” (2009), co-edited with Patricia McAnany.
For more information about the lecture, contact Evie Forsyth at (801) 422-6108 or evie_forsyth@byu.edu.
