OPCA 2025 Closing Keynote Speaker Announcement!

We’re thrilled to now announce our closing keynote speaker for our 2025 conference! Dr. George Heath-Whyte is a fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford, and will be delivering a talk entitled ‘Change, Continuity, and Cognition: Why a “Mesopotamian Religion” still should not be written’.

Here is the abstract for this talk:

It has been over fifty years since A. Leo Oppenheim argued that a “Mesopotamian Religion” should not be written. For Oppenheim, the nature of the evidence available and the conceptual differences between us and the people of ancient Mesopotamia were barriers that could not, and should not, be crossed. I will argue in this lecture that, despite the significant advances made in the last half a century, a systematic treatment of Mesopotamian religion still should not be written. This is not, I will suggest, because of any deficiency in our sources, nor any distance from the minds that wrote them, but rather because of the cognitive continuity between us and our ancient subjects. Human beliefs and practices today – whether religious or atheistic – defy systematisation. Once we abandon hopes of systematising ancient religion, its study can be approached from a more rigorous foundation.

And here is some more information about the speaker:

George is an Assyriologist whose research focuses on the social and religious history of ancient Assyria and Babylonia. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, where he is starting a project on the structure of Babylonian narrative poetry.

This fascinating talk will finish up our conference, and will be delivered on 18 March in the afternoon. Hope to see you there, in person or virtually! We’re so excited!