Research Talks

Nearly seventy years of scientific excavations at Kültepe have yielded a remarkable assemblage of material reflecting the rich and fluid daily lives of the Anatolians, Assyrians, and others who inhabited such a dynamic and cosmopolitan city. A diverse category of objects, metal dress pins, has been recovered from burials at Kültepe and other Middle Bronze Age Anatolian sites, providing tangible connections to the ancient people who wore them. Previous scholarship has focused on the style and origin of these pins, generally associated with female adornment, but both the cuneiform and material records also allow for glimpses into the economic power they held for women during this period. Pierced clothing pins originating in the Mesopotamian sphere, called tudittu in the texts, were often gifted to women upon transformative life events such as marriage or consecration into a religious order. The Old Assyrian mercantile texts record such social transactions but also indicate that tudittu could function as working capital in times of need. Non-pierced Anatolian dress pins have also been recovered and the survival of their impressions on crescent-shaped loom weights across Anatolia also speak to their importance to the economic agency of women. Through a study of the various types of pins and their associated objects within the contextual framework provide by the texts, this paper will explore the multiple roles of these personal objects and analyze how both Anatolian and Assyrian women used pins to mediate the social, religious, and economic worlds in which they navigated.

Right-wing populism experiences unprecedented success on the European political landscape. Illustrative of such success are the UK Independence Party´s Brexit campaign and the Austrian Freedom Party in the last general elections. The first played a major role in the UK´s decision to exit the European Union, and the latter presents Austria´s current government in coalition with the conservative party. My research explores the communication of these parties to the public and the way in which their economic policy proposals changed over the past decades. In doing so, I seek to understand how economic ideas, such as trade tariffs and renationalizing industries regained popularity; more specifically, how are these mobilized to condemn European integration, world markets and globalization and support cultural values such as nationalism, nativism and cultural conservativism. This research thereby contributes to the understanding of how the rise of right-wing populism is not just a cultural backlash against progressive values such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, but also a reaction to neoliberal economic policies that shape the current economic system.

Valentina is an economic sociologist who is interested in socio-political ideas of elites shaping economic integration in Europe. Currently, she is a PhD student at the Sociology Department of the University of Cambridge. Her thesis investigates the rise of economic nationalist ideas in political elite´s discourse. This entails analyzing policy proposals such as the advocacy of monetary nationalism and protectionist trade tariffs in Austria and the UK. For this, she was awarded the Adam Smith Fellowship for research on political economy by the George Mason University, US.