Associate Professor of Egyptology; Fellow of St Cross; Honorary Fellow of The Queen's College
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies / St Cross College
Research Interests:
Ancient Egyptian self-presentation, including biographies, graffiti, and aspects of visual culture
Sacred space and landscape
Social life and experience (including gender, disability)
I grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand and did my first degrees there. I have such vivid childhood memories of sitting in the backseat of the family car while we were stuck in traffic (a regular occurrence), trying to imagine myself into the lives and experiences of the people I saw in the cars all around us. Little has really changed: my research centres on reimagining the lives and practices of Egyptian non-royal, mostly elite, individuals through aspects of their self-presentation. I focus in particular on the late New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period (mid-second to early first millennium BCE). This work encompasses a range of projects in three broad areas: biographical texts of the late New Kingdom, for which I contribute to https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/home; non-royal statues; and graffiti.
My projects on graffiti in the temple of Amun-Re at Karnak are undertaken in collaboration with the Centre Franco-Egyptien d’Etude des Temples de Karnak and co-directed with Chiara Salvador (Milan). This work began with the temple of Ptah, in the northern part of the complex, and we are now also working to publish the eighth pylon.
