Robert K. Englund

Englund teaches at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Humanities Division at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has conducted his major research on the proto-cuneiform texts from late 4th millennium BC Mesopotamia, and, as principal investigator of the project Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), Los Angeles and Berlin, on the electronic documentation and edition of cuneiform generally. He is editor of and contributor to the online journals Cuneiform Digital Library Journal and Bulletin (CDLJ&B), and has collaborated with UCLA CS graduate student Sai Deep Tetali in the creation of an iPad app "cdli tablet" dedicated to informal daily presentations of cuneiform artifacts. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Englund attended high school in Yakima, WA; he finished his BA at the University of California at Berkeley in 1977, and following a year of graduate work at the University of Chicago, moved to Munich, where he wrote his dissertation entitled Verwaltung und Organisation der Ur III-Fischerei (The Administration and Organization of Ur III Fisheries). The thesis is concerned above all with the administration of Babylonian fisheries, focusing on an analysis of the accounting terminology in the Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 BC) archives as a tool for understanding the organization and social position of fishermen and comparable state-dependent workers and supervisors of household economic units. He conducted post-doctoral research and taught at the Free University of Berlin in the 1980's and 90's, and moved to Los Angeles in 1996.