Francesca Rochberg

Francesca Rochberg is Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Office for the History of Science and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a Guggenheim Fellow (1993–1994) and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow (1982–1987) and has held various Visiting Fellowships at Magdalen College, Oxford, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU, Ludwig-Maximilian Universität München, and the Freie Universität Berlin. Her current research project deals with the History and Philosophy of Science, focusing on Near Eastern and Hellenistic antiquity. While at the MPIWG, she plans to work on a book exploring the problem of the demarcation of science and the impact our demarcations have had on the historiography of knowledge. 

Her book Babylonian Horoscopes (American Philosophical Society, 1998) won the 1999 John Frederick Lewis Award from the American Philosophical Society. She has most recently published In the Path of the Moon: Babylonian Celestial Divination and Its Legacy (E.J. Brill, 2010), and Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (University of Chicago, 2016). Co-edited with Alan C. Bowen, Hellenistic Astronomy: The Science in Its Contexts is forthcoming from Brill.