Jana Matuszak is a Sumerologist with a research focus on editing, translating, and analyzing Sumerian literature. She is particularly interested in recovering lesser or hitherto unknown texts. This requires close engagement with original cuneiform manuscripts, which she has studied in collections across Europe, America, and Asia. Her work combines philological basic research with analytical methods derived from literary and cultural studies, leading her to explore intricate problems of grammar and lexicography just as much as broader questions concerning gender, law, religion, and poetics in ancient Iraq.
She is the author of several articles on Sumerian mythology, humor and subversion in Sumerian legal satires, as well as misogyny and the construction of gender in Sumerian didactic poetry. Her monograph “Und du, du bist eine Frau?!” Editio princeps und Analyse des sumerischen Streitgesprächs ‘Zwei Frauen B’ (“And you, you are a woman?! Principal Edition and Analysis of the Sumerian Disputation ‘Two Women B’;” De Gruyter 2021), presents the first critical edition and comprehensive analysis of a Sumerian literary debate about the stakes of womanhood from the early 2nd millennium BCE.
Currently she is working on two book projects. The first, tentatively titled Sumerian Mock Hymns and the Poetics of Subversion, explores the metapoetic role of parody in The Evil Mouth, a previously unknown mock hymn ‘dedicated’ to Innana in her capacity as goddess of sex, transformation, and paradox. The second book, tentatively titled Doing and Undoing Gender in Babylon, reads the newly discovered and still largely inaccessible corpus of Sumerian literary disputations between pairs of male and female peers as evidence of profound investigations into the nature of woman-, man-, and personhood, thereby introducing readers to the first attested discourse on gender in world history.