Dr Yasmina Wicks is a postdoctoral research fellow (MQRF) in Macquarie University's Department of Ancient History specialising in the ancient Near Eastern civilisation of Elam (ca. 4200-525 BCE) located broadly in today’s southwest Iran. She obtained her PhD from the University of Sydney (Australia) in September 2017 with a dissertation on the mortuary practices of the last five centuries of Elam leading up to the Persian Empire, which was published in 2019 as a monograph entitled Profiling Death. Neo-Elamite Mortuary Practices, Afterlife Beliefs, and Entanglements with Ancestors (Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 98; Brill [Leiden]). This volume followed on from her 2015 monograph Bronze ‘Bathtub’ Coffins in the Context of 8th-6th Century B.C.E. Babylonian, Assyrian and Elamite Funerary Practices based on her honours thesis (University of Sydney, awarded with University Medal), published with the specialist archaeology press, Archaeopress (Oxford). Yasmina has also authored several articles and book chapters on her areas of research expertise, and alongside her colleagues Prof Javier Álvarez-Mon (Macquarie University) and Prof Gian Pietro Basello (University of Naples “L’Orientale”), she acted as editor and co-contributor for the magisterial 2018 volume The Elamite World for the Routledge Worlds Series (Francis & Taylor, London & New York). This ambitious work brought together over 40 international scholars to offer an up-to-date treatment of Elam from its origins in the late Chalcolithic period to its legacy in Achaemenid Persia and beyond.

Yasmina’s research has profited from extended periods of collaborative work with colleagues in Europe. In 2014 she was awarded an Endeavour Research Fellowship by the Australian Government to work for 6 months on textual aspects of her PhD project at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. In 2019 she worked as a visiting postdoctoral research fellow on a collaborative project on ancient Near Eastern funerary practices with “L’Orientale” and Sapienza Università di Roma, Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità (funded by ISMEO [Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente]). Late in 2019 she also held a visiting postdoctoral fellowship at Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, to conduct her research project “Children and the Social Construction of Childhood in Elam”. Since 2018 she has been an invited International Committee Member and Reviewer for the French CNRS journal Abstracta Iranica.