Exploring the Assumptions of Cultural History is multi-year project organized by The Future of the Past Lab, the Department of Classical & Near Eastern Religions & Cultures, and the Center for Premodern Studies at UMN Twin Cities that will bring a series of visiting fellows to campus. With these fellowships, FoP, CNRC, and CPS hope to foster discussion about the ways in which the study of ancient and premodern cultural history has adopted (often unconsciously) anachronistic categories, premises, and practices and how we can move forward in the study of premodern cultures in a way that better understands the contexts we study. We are very excited to announce our four fellows for 2025-2026: Professor Peter van Dommelen (Fall 2025), Professor Jake Nabel (Spring 2026), and Professor Shubha Pathak (Spring 2026)!
Peter van Dommelen is the Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Anthropology at Brown University (Providence, RI). As a Mediterranean archaeologist, he studies cultural interactions, indigeneity and colonialism in the Iron Age and Phoenician-Punic West Mediterranean. His research concerns migration, rural landscapes, and ancient agriculture, which structure long-term fieldwork and ceramic studies on Sardinia. He co-edits the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology and the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World book series (Brepols). Publications include Rural Landscapes of the Punic World (2008, with Carlos Gómez Bellard) and Il Mediterraneo occidentale dalla fase fenicia all’egemonia cartaginese (2021, co-edited with M. Botto and A. Roppa). Peter will be visiting from October 6-10, 2025.
Jake Nabel is the Tombros Early Career Professor of Classical Studies and an Assistant Professor of Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is a historian of ancient Rome, pre-Islamic Iran, and the points of contact between the two. His book The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding in Roman-Parthian Relations was published by the University of California Press in April 2025. At Minnesota, he will be developing a new monograph on the concept of freedom in post-Hellenistic Iran. Jake will be visiting from March 30-April 3, 2026.
Shubha Pathak is an Associate Professor in American University’s Department of Philosophy and Religion. Her interpretations of Greek, Indian, and Roman epics reflect her training as both a social and behavioral scientist and a historian of religions. The author of Divine Yet Human Epics and the editor of Figuring Religions, she currently is delving into literary innovations, religious influences, and political critiques couched in the earliest Roman and Indian amatory epics, as well as surveying cycles shaping the cosmic mandates of panthea’s supreme deities, cognitions and emotions motivating inter-religious interactions, and heuristic narratives’ uses in cross-cultural studies. Shubha will be visiting from April 20-24, 2026.
The Future of the Past Lab 
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