Tomoki Kitazumi is a graduate of the Ancient Languages and Texts (ALT) program at Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies. In his dissertation entitled "Die Übersetzungstätigkeit und -verfahren im hethitischen Reich", he analyzed how scribes in the Hittite empire dealt with foreign languages (Hattic, Hurrian, and Akkadian) and what goals they wanted to achieve through their intensive translation activities and intercultural mediation. With his dissertation, in which he works with methodologies employed in translation studies and analyses the texts philologically, Tomoki Kitazumi has made an important contribution to the discussion on multilingualism in the tradition of the Hittite empire.

The International Association for Assyriology (IAA) awards an annual prize for the best PhD dissertation in the field of Assyriology (in the broadest sense, all cuneiform studies) and Mesopotamian Archaeology.

We warmly congratulate Tomoki Kitazumi!