Academic Bio
Colton is a PhD candidate in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations specializing in Sumerology. Previously, he double majored in Classics and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University where he received a Bachelor of Arts with honors in 2016. He also received a Master of Arts in Cuneiform Studies in 2018 from the University of Chicago. While at Cornell, he was an assistant at the Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology and the Rosen Tablet Conservation Laboratory. Currently, he is writing his dissertation on the Sumerian modal prefixes. He is the Assistant Curator of the Oriental Institute Tablet Collection and a research assistant for the Gilgamesh branch of CEDAR for OCHRE as well as for an NEH grant project. His research interests include mood and modality, socio-historical linguistics, bilingualism, the origins of scripts, Sumerian morphology, and analyzing Akkadian and Sumerian texts with corpus-based approaches. Stemming from his general interest in digital humanities, he is interested in the use of computational linguistic models within Assyriology. He has teaching experience in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages and cultures.