Geoff Emberling has been Director of the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago since 2004. He received his BA in Anthropology from Harvard and his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan with a dissertation on ethnicity in early Mesopotamia. He has held positions as Lecturer at the University of Copenhagen and as Assistant Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 1998 to 2004 he directed excavations at Tell Brak, a site in northeastern Syria that contains the remains of one of the earliest and largest Mesopotamian cities, and he has more recently directed two seasons of salvage excavation in the 4th Cataract of the Nile in northern Sudan.

For the past 5 years, he has taught American military units about the history of Iraq as a part of their pre-deployment cultural awareness training.