Her keynote lecture is entitled: 
Making and Breaking Cities: the Historiography of Urban Archaeology in the MENA Region

Abstract: While the Near East has often been epitomized as the cradle of urbanism, with countless early urban sites, and urbanization in the Bronze and Iron Ages a well-developed field of study, urbanism as an ontological category pertaining to later, especially the Hellenistic and Roman periods is surprisingly limited. While single monuments, religious architecture, public buildings or certain aspects of the elite material culture of Near Eastern cities have been studied in detail, holistic approaches to the life of ancient cities have rarely been undertaken, despite a string of grand narratives about Roman period sites, exactly with an emphasis on their Roman character and more recently with a focus on their non-Roman traits. Publications that address urbanism in the Roman Near East have been primarily concerned with detecting common or comparative features in the often monumental cityscapes. This presentation introduces new research on the historiography of urban archaeology in the MENA region and aims to shed light on the archaeological activities and practices from 1869 to 1946 (the Late Ottoman period until the end of the Mandate period) by re-examining archival and photographic materials along with archaeological and historical publications. The investigation seeks to uncover how current urban archaeological approaches and methodologies have been, often unknowingly, shaped by the paradigms established during this earlier period.