An Assyriologist by training (Dr. phil. University of Leipzig, 2013), Dr. Hess works at the intersection of historical geography, intellectual history, and scribal culture in the late second and first millennium BCE. He has previously taught in the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and was the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship to study scribal performance and standardization in cuneiform lexical lists. He has also worked regularly in excavations and field surveys in Iraqi Kurdistan, focusing on the Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age transition. His project at ANAMED investigates the scribal practices of the scholarly community at the Neo-Assyrian site of Sultantepe (Şanlıurfa Province) in the context of regional and transregional Anatolian networks of exchange.