Aren Wilson-Wright studies ancient Israel and its neighbors with a focus on religious practice, intercultural contact, and the materiality of writing. The Northwest Semitic languages stand at the center of her research, both as a tool of analysis and as a topic of study in their own right.
Wilson-Wright’s first book, Athtart: The Transmission and Transformation of a Goddess in the Late Bronze Age, argues that the characteristics of deities in the ancient world reflect the everyday practices of their worshippers using the goddess Athtart as a case study. In her second book, Jeremiah’s Egypt: Reflections of the Saite Period in the Book of Jeremiah, she shows that many of the references to Egypt in the Book of Jeremiah reflect the effects of Egyptian imperialism during the Saite period. Other recent research projects include new editions of several early alphabetic inscriptions from Serabit el-Khadem and the development of machine learning tools for the study of Biblical Hebrew.
Wilson-Wright teaches courses on Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew.