Lara Fabian

Assistant Professor of Iranian Archaeology

 

Education

  • 2018 Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World
  • 2011 B.A., Hunter College, City University of New York, Classical Archaeology
  • 2006 B.F.A, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Theatrical Set Design

Areas of Interest

Iron Age through Sasanian Iran and Southwest Asia, mobile pastoralist/sedentary relationships, the South Caucasus (archaeology, history, and historiography), landscape archaeology, economic history, numismatics, historiography of archaeology, with a focus on Russsophone traditions


Profile

I am an archaeologist whose work focuses on Iran and broader Southwest Asia in the Iron Age and later, and particularly the Achaemenid through Sasanian periods. My current research and book project considers the South Caucasus as a nexus of interaction between the Iranian, Mediterranean, and Steppe spheres in this period. I study how people here interacted with and reacted to the pan-regional political structures on their borders, considering state and imperial formations (e.g., the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Arsacid, and Roman empires) and also mobile pastoralist federations (e.g., the Sarmatians and Alans). My scholarship is informed by historiographic and reception studies on the development of thought about antiquity and the question of Iran in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Eurasia. As part of this wider research, I have co-directed a collaborative Azerbaijani-American fieldwork project in the Lerik region of Azerbaijan since 2016. Before coming to UCLA, I worked on the “Beyond the Silk Road” ERC project at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

Publications

Articles

Reviews

  • Iberia Caucasica. Ein Kleinkönigreich im Spannungsfeld großer Imperien. By Frank Schleicher.  Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (Forthcoming).
  • Empire of the Black Sea: The Rise and Fall of the Mithridatic World. By Duane W. Roller. The Classical Outlook 96.3 (2021): 137–138.
  • “Prismatic Perspectives on the Pre-Islamic Empires of Persia.” Antiquity 92.364 (2018): 1118–1120.