Jenny Reddish joined the Complexity Science Hub in September 2019. She has been working for the Seshat: Global History Databank as a research assistant and as a lead editor since 2016 and 2019, respectively.

For Seshat, she works on gathering information on social complexity, warfare, ritual and other features of past societies from historical, archaeological and anthropological sources in order to populate the databank, as well as on writing and editing publications deriving from the project.

At CSH, Jenny is part of Peter Turchin’s research group on Social Complexity and Collapse. It aims both to expand Seshat’s geographical coverage as well as to build within Seshat a dedicated “Crisis Databank” of around 300 past societies that entered and emerged from political crises.

Jenny holds degrees in archaeology and anthropology. She is currently co-editing a volume on the Axial Age, drawing on Seshat data, and is a contributor to an upcoming volume on human sacrifice and its relationship with social inequality. Jenny also served as assistant editor of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution. She has previously worked as editorial assistant for the World Art journal and as research assistant for projects on Fijian art and on the archaeology of the Niger Valley in West Africa. Jenny has participated in excavations of Neolithic, Roman and Anglo-Saxon sites in the UK and a Moche site on the north coast of Peru.