Natalie Dohrmann (NBD): Xandy, tell us a bit about your broad scholarly interests, what drew you to them, and what especially excites you about them personally and/or intellectually.

In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, columnist Elisabeth Rosenthal poses a question that is becoming ever more pressing as the coronavirus crisis continues: how can we reconnect to other people without being able to tell whether it is potentially lethal to get too close to them?

This blog post is part of a series focused on the research of current fellows. In this edition, Katz Center Director Steven Weitzman sits down with Melissa S. Cradic, who recently earned her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on funerary practices and ancestor lineages in the Bronze Age Levant.