Eduardo Escobar

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Eduardo A. Escobar is a historian of knowledge specializing in instruction manuals and the transmission of material and technical knowledge within cuneiform scholarly cultures of the ancient Middle East. His current book project, The Scribal Craft: Cuneiform Procedural Knowledge and the Material World, offers an intellectual history of procedural knowledge, examining how craft, materials, and expertise shaped scribal scholarship in the late second and early first millennia BCE. As part of the ERC-funded AlchemEast project, he investigated Akkadian recipes for making glass, perfume, and dyeing wool, tracing scribal notions of material purity, transformation, and the transmission of specialized knowledge. He is also co-editor of Scribal Worlds: Scholarship and Classification in Cuneiform Cultures (UCL Press, 2026), a volume that explores how ancient scholars structured and systematized knowledge through writing. 

Dr. Escobar has held research and teaching appointments at the University of Chicago and the University of Bologna, where he taught courses on Babylonian knowledge, historiography, and natural philosophy in the pre-modern world, alongside broader surveys in the global history of science. He earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies and Science & Technology Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds degrees from Columbia University and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.