Rocco Palermo
Biography
Rocco Palermo is Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. He obtained his joint PhD from the University of Naples Federico II and Universtié de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. From 2017 to 2021, he was a VENI Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), and then a Researcher (Ricercatore A) at the University of Pisa (Italy), before joining Bryn Mawr College in 2023.
His research explores the archaeology of Southwest Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean from the Iron Age to the late Roman period, with a particular focus on cultural interaction, rural communities, imperial landscapes, and long-distance connectivity. He is the Director of the Gird-i Matrab Archaeological Project in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, an international excavation investigating the development of rural communities from the Late Chalcolithic through the Seleucid and Parthian-Roman periods. His fieldwork has also taken him to Italy, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Oman, Arctic Canada, and across Iraqi Kurdistan.
Rocco's scholarship combines excavation, landscape archaeology, and material culture studies to examine how local communities negotiated broader political, economic, and cultural transformations. His publications address topics including Hellenistic and Roman Mesopotamia, rural archaeology, imperial frontiers, and cultural connectivity across Southwest Asia. He is the author of On the Edge of Empires: North Mesopotamia during the Roman Period (Routledge, 2019), People, Peasants, and the Empire: Landscape and Settlements Evolution in Mesopotamia from Assyria to Rome(Cambridge University Press, in press), and he is currently working on a book on urbanism in Graeco-Roman Southwest Asia, also for Cambridge University Press (due Summer 2027). His research has appeared in numerous books, edited volumes, and leading journals, including the American Journal of Archaeology, Bulletin of the American Society for Overseas Research, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Iraq, Mesopotamia, Archaeological Prospection Egitto e Vicino Oriente, and Parthica.
Palermo's research has been awarded prestigious grants and awards, including the NWO VENI Grant, a Gerda Henkel Foundation Fellowship, an ASOR Project Grant, and, more recently, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship.