As a member of team 1 at ANEE (Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires, University of Helsinki), Evelien's doctoral dissertation applies approaches from digital humanities and social sciences to study the historical development of marriage as an adaptive and responsive social institution, for the different regions of Mesopotamia, from the early to the late 1st millennium BCE. Her doctoral dissertation aims to establish how changes in the political, social, economic and administrative dynamics of the subsequent first world empires of the Assyrians, Chaldeans/Babylonians, Persians and Macedonians/Seleucids influenced the marriage system of various social groups. She obtained a Master of Arts in the Language and Area Studies of the Ancient Near East (Syro-Mesopotamia) (KU Leuven) and a Bachelor in Archaeology (Ghent University).