Prize recipient 2024 | Classical archeologist Rubina Raja

Rubina Raja is an ambitious pioneer with an extensive and widely acclaimed scholarly contribution. She is a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Aarhus and world-renowned for her research into the dynamics of past urban societies. She broadens the traditional focus of classical archaeology by expanding the view from Greece and Rome to a wider geographical and cultural horizon, by moving beyond a focus on materiality to a comprehensive view of human interactions, and by leaving a linear, power-centred approach to urban cultures in favour of a focus on dynamic human networks of commercial, cultural and communicative exchange. Together with colleagues in archaeology, geoscience and physics, she has developed a high-definition approach to archaeological excavations, thus decisively pushing the international archaeological and historical research agenda.

There are at least three facets to Rubina Rajas’s academic excellence. Rubina Raja is a prolific, ambitious and internationally revered expert on the ancient city of Palmyra in present Syria and director of the Palmyra Portrait Project. This is the largest study ever undertaken of ancient norms of human representation, and its key outcome is the publication of more than 4,000 Palmyrene funerary portraits. Her work on Palmyra has ensured a holistic understanding of a site which is now largely lost due to the civil war in Syria.

Rubina Raja is an eminent research leader of large-scale research endeavours and fieldwork projects in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Her main leadership achievement is the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet) at Aarhus University funded by the Danish National Research Foundation since 2015. Her leadership skills come to the fore, for example, when she conducts fieldwork in conflict zones and extreme environments, liaising with local communities and governmental departments, and directing teams of up to 100 local and international scholars. She has an outstanding record for supporting and supervising junior researchers towards tenure-track positions globally. Archaeology is not a major field of research at today’s universities, and the long list of young researchers she has guided towards permanent positions testifies to her mentoring abilities and the international attention and recognition that her centre and its researchers enjoy.

As a lighthouse in her field, Rubina Raja has founded a research journal and several international book series. Her engagement in creating strong publication fora underlines her generous and ambitious effort to promote the research ideas of colleagues, be they junior or senior. Already within its first years of existence, the Journal of Urban Archaeology has become internationally recognized as a forum abounding in innovative research discussions. Book series such as Mediterranean Studies in Antiquity and Urban Archaeological Pasts, published by Cambridge University Press, show her commitment to stellar research in archaeology, ancient history and classics. While her two interdisciplinary book series Women of the Past and Archive Archaeology attest to her dedication to developing and honing research in the humanities towards new standards of nuanced understandings and approaches.