Professor Peter Chomowicz is a professor in the Middle East Studies department. Chomowicz first began working in the field as a graduate student in the department of architecture and design and the department of near eastern languages and civilization at Harvard. “I was able to put those two pieces together in one course of study when I assisted one of my professors in the near eastern studies department with an excavation in Ashkelon, Israel,” Chomowicz says. “I became very interested in the question of how it all began for us— not just in terms of architecture and urbanism in the Middle East but in terms of all of the cultural traditions that are embodied in architecture: writing, law, religion, text, and language.”