Birgitta Eder


Birgitta Eder is an Austrian Archaeologist and Mycenologist. She is the director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute at Athens.

Education

Eder studied ancient history and classical archaeology at the University of Vienna from 1980 until 1986, followed by postgraduate study at University College London in 1988/89. She completed her PhD at the University of Vienna in 1995. During this period she also worked as a research assistant in the Mycenaean Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Career

Eder held an APART-Stipendum at the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 1998 until 2000. In 1997, she participated in the German Archaeological Institute excavation at Olympia. From 2001 until 2007, she continued to work as a researcher at the Mycenaean Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2007, she joined the department of Classical Archaeology of the Institute of Archaeological Science at the University of Freiberg. In 2013, she returned to the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where she worked as a researcher in the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, and from 2014 was the director of the Mycenaean Aegean research group. In 2018, she was awarded a habilitation at TU Darmstadt for the work Elis und Olympia: Die Genese zweier Zentren einer Landschaft. In the same year, she was a visiting fellow at Merton College, Oxford.
Since 2019, Eder has been the director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute at Athens. She is project leader for excavations at Kakovatos and Kleidi-Samikon in the Peloponnese.
In February 2020, she gave the Denys Haynes Memorial Lecture at the British Museum.

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