Gabriel Pizzorno

Gabriel Pizzorno is Senior Lecturer on History at Harvard University. His research focuses on the use of material culture as a historical source, and the development and application of advanced digital methodologies and tools to enhance our understanding of the human past.

In the Department of History, Pizzorno teaches courses on digital methods, materiality theory, and ancient history. He is also responsible for the coordination and development of departmental initiatives in digital research and pedagogy through the Program in Digital History. Pizzorno also helps coordinate university-wide digital initiatives through the Digital Scholarship Support Group, which he co-founded in 2015, and of which he is Faculty Chair.

He is currently co-principal investigator on two major international research projects, the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe and the Holocaust Materialities Network, and is currently finishing a monograph on Dinkha Tepe, an archaeological site in northwestern Iran. The monograph challenges key aspects of our understanding of the history of the region by weaving together different strands of evidence—stratigraphic, artefactual, textual, landscape, and scientific—to reconstruct the long–term history of the site from the second millennium BCE to the present.

Before joining the Department of History at Harvard in 2014, Pizzorno was a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where he led efforts to digitize, and make available online, the extensive archives of several long-running archaeological projects. He received his PhD in Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011.