Dr. Milinda Hoo is Assistant Professor of Ancient History and Identity Formation. She specializes in globalization, cultural interaction, Hellenism, and geographical imaginations across central Eurasia, with a particular focus on Central Asia.
Her research and teaching combine ancient history with material culture studies, social theories (in particular globalization theories, frontier zone research, and postcolonial studies), and critical historiography to explore cultural diversity and negotiations of identity on three levels: historically, historiographically, and conceptually. She focuses on the history, archaeology, and cultural imagination of ancient Central Asia (eastern Iran, Parthia, Bactria, and the Eurasian 'nomadic' steppes) through which she addresses broader questions of cultural transformations, inbetweenness, identity- and boundary construction, imperialism, and geography in globalizing contexts of Achaemenid, Hellenistic, and Roman Afro-Eurasia.
Trained in Language and Cultural Studies (BA) and Ancient Studies (MA) in the Netherlands, she earned her PhD degree in Ancient History summa cum laude at Kiel University, Germany, within the international Graduate School ‘Human Development in Landscapes’ in 2018. From 2018 to 2023, she was employed as Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and was active as an associate member of the ERC Project ‘Beyond the Silk Road: Economic Development, Frontier Zones, and Inter-Imperiality in the Afro-Eurasian World Region, 300 BCE to 300 CE’. She joined the Utrecht Ancient History group in 2023.
Milinda Hoo is the author of Eurasian Localisms: Towards a Translocal Approach to Hellenism and Inbetweenness in Central Eurasia, Third to First Centuries BCE (2022) and co-editor of TALANTA: Peer-Reviewed Journal for the Study of Antiquity. She is also co-editor of forthcoming proceedings of the fourth Hellenistic Central Asia Research Network conference (Entangled Pasts and Presents: Temporal Interactions and Knowledge Production in the Study of Hellenistic Central Asia), and is currently working on a second monograph on the mnemohistory and spatiocultural imagination of ‘the North-East’ (the Iranian highlands, Central Asia, and the Eurasian 'nomadic' steppes).
Research interests
- The ancient history, archaeology, and cultures of the Near East, Iran, and Central Asia
- Global history and globalization theories
- Postcolonial studies, identity theories
- Cross-cultural interactions, East-West relations, Orientalism
- Inbetweenness, frontier zones, borderlands
- Geography and placedness
- Ancient ethnography
- Nomadism
- Scythians and Amazons
- Alexander the Great
- Iranian and Hellenistic empires
- Hellenism and Hellenization
- Memory studies, reception, temporality