Academic Bio
Colton is a PhD student in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations specializing in Assyriology and Sumerology. Previously, he double majored in Classics and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University where he received a Bachelor of Arts with honors. While at Cornell, he was an archivist at the Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology and the Rosen Tablet Conservation Laboratory. Currently, he is undertaking coursework and working as a student research assistant for the Ras Shamra Tablet Inventory project associated with OCHRE. His main research interests include socio-historical linguistics, bilingualism and diglossia in the ancient world, the origins of writing systems, Sumerian verbal morphology, and analyzing Akkadian and Sumerian texts with corpus-based approaches. Stemming from his general interest in digital humanities, he is interested in furthering the use of computational linguistic models in his field.