María del Carmen Hidalgo-Chacón Díez is a Semitic philologist who has focused her interest on pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphy, historical linguistics and the ancient history of the Arabia Peninsula. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the AlUla Inscriptions Corpus Analysis (AICAP) project, in collaboration with the The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU). This project aims to collect and analyse the epigraphic material from the AlUla region, Saudi Arabia in a database.
She obtained her PhD in Semitic Studies from the University of Marburg in Germany, for her research on the etymology of the theophoric anthroponyms in the Dadanitic inscriptions from AlUla, Saudi Arabia. After finishing her PhD, she held her postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford in the UK in the project The Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia (OCIANA) and collaborated as a researcher at the University of Pisa in Italy in the project Digital Archive for the Study of Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI). She also worked as a book editor, specialising in ancient Arabian epigraphy for the archaeological company Preventive and Digital Archaeology.
She was a lecturer in Jordan as part of the teaching programme of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). She worked at the University of Yarmouk in Irbid for three years, and at the University of Amman for two years.
