Rate My Professor Lubna Omar

Lubna Omar serves as Instructor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Center for Middle East and North Africa Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She earned her PhD from Kyoto University. Omar is a zooarchaeologist whose research and teaching interests broadly focus on the archaeology of human and animal relations, including complex societies in the Near East and the emergence of urban economies and subsistence resources in prehistoric and historical settlements. Her expertise lies in using faunal analysis to explore past socio-economic patterns and human behaviors.

Omar has carried out fieldwork in Syria, Turkey, Jordan, and Japan, with her primary research focus on northern Mesopotamia. There, she reconstructs the socio-economic patterns of urban centers through the analysis of animal remains, illustrating the development of urbanism in the region during the Bronze Age and later periods. She is currently working on publishing the results of previous fieldwork from Syrian sites to highlight the importance of documenting archaeological work in this critical region. Key scholarly outputs include her doctoral dissertation, Bronze Age Animal Economy in al-Jazira Area of North-eastern Syria (Kyoto University, 2010), and the chapter Approaching Medieval Cuisine: Employing Zooarchaeological Methods on Anatolian Faunal Assemblages in Medieval MasterChef: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Eastern Culinary Traditions (2017). Within Binghamton University's Anthropology faculty, she teaches courses such as Zooarchaeology (ANTH 373) and Cultural Heritage in Crisis (AMS 380A). Omar contributes to interdisciplinary efforts, including the Material and Visual Worlds seed grant project 'Smaller Narratives for a Larger World,' and serves as an affiliate of the Human Rights Institute. Her involvement extends to events like World Anthropology Day discussions in the Archaeological Analytical Lab.