
Gina Konstantopoulos is Associate Professor of Assyriology and Cuneiform Studies and has worked at UCLA since 2021. Her work centers on religion, magic, and literature in Mesopotamia, with a focus on the role of demons and monsters in Sumerian and Akkadian texts.
Gina was raised in New York. She completed her B.A. in 2007 at Mount Holyoke College, one of the Seven Sisters. For a year after that, Gina worked with NYC Teaching Fellows, teaching 8th grade in the Bronx as she contemplated graduate school. She then went on to pursue her Ph.D. in Assyriology from the University of Michigan. This area of academia was different from what she had studied while at Mount Holyoke, where she majored in Japanese and Japanese History. She applied to the University of Michigan to study Assyriology and was surprised but elated about her acceptance.
Over the course of a short summer internship at the British Museum during her Ph.D., Gina engaged in work on Museum Studies, cataloguing and photographing a section of the cuneiform collection. Following this summer, she was also able to spend a year on a DAAD fellowship at the University of Würzburg. For the final year of her degree, she held a fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked on her dissertation as well as a project on inscribed cylinder seals from the Kassite period (c. 1400 BCE.) After receiving her PhD in 2015, she moved to the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (NYU-ISAW) as a Visiting Assistant Professor for two years. Following this, she “circumnavigated the globe in academic postings,” as she put it, which included working at the University of Helsinki in Finland for two years, and the University of Tsukuba, north of Tokyo, for about a year and a half. After learning about all of Gina’s international pursuits, I consider her to be one of the most well-traveled individuals I have met!
I appreciated Gina’s enthusiasm for every one of her many academic and career-related endeavors. As someone who has great admiration for folks who are multifaceted, with a wide-range of interests and/or skills, I resonated deeply with one of Gina’s mottos–one she shares with her students–which is that “you can never know what will come in handy, what will be useful” in your work. Gina believes that it is wise to dip one’s feet in a variety of academic, research, and professional ponds, both for the benefit of one’s career and personal expertise. Gina epitomizes this. She also recognizes that it is equally important to enjoy what you are doing. Before studying Assyriology, Gina was planning on a pre-med track for her first year of undergrad. Though she enjoyed biology, she felt nowhere near as called to it as she did to history and language. Nevertheless, having science courses under her belt allowed her to teach for a year while applying to graduate school. The takeaway for her was that “nothing is ever wasted.”
While working in Japan, Gina came across the position she currently holds at UCLA, and she settled in at UCLA in January of 2021. Despite finding enjoyment in the time she spent “chasing jobs,” Gina was very excited to be welcomed by UCLA’s NELC Department. This is her fifth academic year at the university, and her first as an Associate Professor.
Assyriology is a huge field, so Gina covers a lot of ground in what she teaches undergraduate and graduate students. Her own research is more tailored to religion and literature, in which she studies demons and monsters in the ancient world, as well as what we might consider “magic” but is essentially just a component of how religion operated in ancient societies. One of her published books, The Divine/Demonic Seven and the Place of Demons in Mesopotamia, is a study of a group of somewhat ‘divine’ demons across the 2,000 years of their attestations. It discusses how these demons appear in texts and how they are used by kings in the first millennium to be what Gina calls “attack dogs of the state.” Gina was always interested in magic and ritual, particularly with demons and monsters, but she has come to find the subject of fear particularly intriguing—especially when considering the notion that “through fear we understand who people and cultures are.”
She is currently focused on two major projects. The first centers on distant lands in ancient Mesopotamia, looking at how the region views “the edges of its own world.” In other words, this research studies how what we typically think of as an ‘edge’ has its place at the end of map, representing something “fantastical.” Although that phrase is somewhat embellished, Gina explores this idea of the fantastical, alongside the tension it creates “between what is real and imagined.” This work will take the form of a collection of case studies that invoke discussion around “how we imagine space.” The second project she is working on centers around emotions, particularly on those connected to one king, the Neo-Assyrian king, Esarhaddon (c. 700 BC). In this project Gina is investigating how Esarhaddon uses fear as a tool, but also how he himself is a somewhat anxious figure. The through-line through her research, as Gina emphasizes, is a “concern about how Mesopotamia talks about what is different” or “their sense of ‘the other,’” be it demonic, monstrous, foreign, or simply what is feared. She also works in reception studies, which she very much enjoys, researching how Mesopotamia appears in modern contexts like horror and horror comics, as well as the general presence of the larger Babylonian creation myth. As a death metal fan, I was amused to learn that there are in fact a vast number of intersections between this genre of music and ancient Mesopotamia, especially in Scandinavian bands. These two big projects should eventually each become a monograph, but Gina is currently in the early stages of their research.
As Gina mentioned to me, having all of these texts and art from several millennia ago can be overwhelming. Furthermore, Assyriology is a difficult field in that it lacks a large number of people working in it, so trying to handle all this material can appear at times quite daunting. Bringing in as much personal material as possible, as much primary source material, and being aware and comfortable with how much exists is essential. Gina reminds us to “be okay with the enormity of material and not knowing everything,” even if that is frightening. Even if you feel like a “duck on the surface of an immeasurably deep lake, choose to be excited if occasionally frustrated by it,” Gina says. As she tells her students, “Nobody gets into this field unless they really want to,” so choose to be optimistic about the fact that there will always be new things to learn.
While I found every aspect of Gina’s story to be immensely fascinating, I should also mention that she works with many languages–not surprising given the many years she spent abroad. At Tsukuba, her day-to-day work was often in Japanese, though she does not consider herself fluent per se; she is rusty but can still attempt to hold a conversation in German; and though she wanted to learn Finnish she did not quite manage (but who knows what the future holds). As far as dead languages, she is well-versed in Akkadian and Sumerian and teaches both at all levels here at UCLA, but she has also worked in several others. Additionally, Gina practices Japanese martial arts, specifically Iaido and Jōdō. She has been taking part in them for about a decade now. She trains with her sensai in New York, as well as with folks here in LA. This hobby emerged out of her interest in Japan and Japanese history, and she has consistently engaged in it wherever she has traveled and lived. She appreciates the break it provides from her academic pursuits, coupled with the great community it fosters.
We are proud to have such an influential, passionate, and driven faculty member in UCLA’s NELC Department. We are excited to see her continue to positively impact the university and her area of scholarship with her wisdom, hopefulness, and vigor!
…
Brinn Wallin is a first-year transfer student at UCLA who works as a Student Administrative Assistant for KNAG. She is studying English and Creative Writing, alongside her research on the poet Sylvia Plath. Originally from Sacramento, where her beloved family and dog currently live, Brinn graduated early from high school and attended community college before transitioning to UCLA. In her spare time she enjoys spending time at the beach with friends, playing piano, listening to music, running, and trying different coffee shops in LA.