Rate My Professor Helen Dixon

Helen Dixon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at East Carolina University, specializing in Phoenician history and culture in the first millennium BCE. As an interdisciplinary scholar of the ancient Mediterranean world, her research explores how Phoenicians and their neighbors shaped and negotiated social identities in life and death, informed by archaeological excavation, museum study, and archive work across Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Greece. She holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from McGill University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, completed in 2013. Dixon offers courses at graduate and undergraduate levels in Ancient Mediterranean History and Museum Studies.

Prior to her appointment at East Carolina University in 2019, she served as Assistant Professor of Religion at Wofford College from 2017 to 2019, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions from 2015 to 2017—where she co-authored a national grant for the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires—and Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in History at North Carolina State University from 2013 to 2015. Her key publications include “Reexamining Nebuchadnezzar II’s ‘Thirteen-Year’ Siege of Tyre in Phoenician Historiography” in the Journal of Ancient History (2022), “Placing Them 'In Eternity': Symbolic Mummification in Levantine Phoenicia” in Rivista di Studi Fenici (2022), “The Smells of Eternity: Aromatic Oils and Resins in the Phoenician Mortuary Record” in the Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East (2021), “Late First Millennium BCE Levantine Dog Burials as an Extension of Human Mortuary Behavior” in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (2018), “‘Blue from Babylon’: Notes from the Curatorial Trenches” (2018), and contributions to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions (2015) and The Five-Minute Archaeologist (2016). Secondary interests include digital humanities applications to ancient studies and ethical challenges of the international antiquities trade. In 2023, she received a Study Collections Fellowship from the American Schools of Oriental Research for research in Tunisia on Punic religious and social life. Dixon serves as Vice Chair of East Carolina University’s Libraries Committee.