Marian Feldman is associate professor in the Departments of the History of Art and Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD in Art History at Harvard University in Ancient Near Eastern Art and concentrates on the arts of the second and first millennium BCE in the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. Her interests range from questions regarding the role of the arts in cultural interactions to issues of object agency and materiality. Most recently, Professor Feldman has been a Getty Foundation »Connecting Art Histories« Visiting Professor at Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behaviorial Sciences at Stanford University. She is currently finishing a book that examines the ways communities form around — and by means of — art objects, focusing on portable luxury items (ivory and metalwork) in the first half of the first millennium BCE (to be published by the University of Chicago Press in late 2014).