Professor Richardson received his Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern History from Columbia University in 2002. After occupying a post-doctoral research fellowship at Columbia for a year, he came to Chicago to teach history. He is responsible for NELCÕs graduate program in Ancient Near Eastern History, and is the Mesopotamian Faculty Advisor to the Oriental Institute Museum. He is now continuing work on research projects related to Old Babylonian economic and administrative texts, Assyrian political history, an intellectual history of early Babylonian liver divination, and Ancient Near East labor history, state collapse, and chronology.