James Burgin is an Assistant Professor of Hittitology. His research focuses on the administrative and cultural history of the Hittite kingdom. A firm advocate for combining philology and archaeology whenever possible, his first books analyzed the economic, religious, and administrative history of the Hittite Kingdom through its textual and material culture. He is the author of Functional Differentiation in Hittite Festival Texts (Harrassowitz 2019) and the two-volume Studies in Hittite Economic Administration (Harrassowitz 2022).
His current work turns to the development of historiographical techniques in the Ancient Near East. His primary research question is the development of and trajectory of the Hittite Annals, some of the earliest extensive historical texts in the world. This direction represents an outgrowth of the research group "The Hittite Annals: Origins, Purpose, and Afterlife" that he led at the University of Würzburg prior to coming to Chicago. In this group, he and his collaborators incorporated narratological perspectives to compare historiographical texts from different cuneiform cultures. As part of the larger goal of situating these texts in the cuneiform world, James is in the process of producing a comprehensive edition of the Hittite Annal corpus with contextualizing studies. In his future path of research, he is eager to incorporate resources from the digital humanities to continue his investigations into the Hittite language, as well as other ancient languages such as Hurrian and Hieroglyphic Luwian.
James earned his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Chicago. Between his graduation in 2016 and return to Chicago in 2025, he worked on or lead various research projects in Germany. After an initial year at the Corpus der hethitischen Festrituale (HFR) project at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur - Mainz, he spent most of his postdoctoral career in Würzburg, where he and his family lived for eight years, with shorter stays at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Vienna.