Contributors
Colleen Manassa, curator of Echoes of Egypt: Conjuring the Land of the Pharaohs, is the William K. and Marilyn M. Simpson Associate Professor of Egyptology at Yale University. She is the author or co-author of five books on topics including military history, Egyptian religion, and literature of the New Kingdom, and author of numerous articles on art history, philology, and sensory experience in ancient Egypt. She is also director of the Moalla Survey Project.
Alicia Cunningham-Bryant, the assistant curator and digital media coordinator of Echoes of Egypt: Conjuring the Land of the Pharaohs, is Assistant Professor of Intellectual Heritage at Temple University. She received her Ph.D. in Egyptology from Yale University, where her dissertation focused on the Meroitic kingdom (ca. 400 BCE–400 CE), located in what is now Sudan, and specifically on cultural influence in funerary and religious practices in early East Africa. Her role as head archivist for the Yale Peabody Museum William K. Simpson archive led to her current project on Yale, UNESCO, and American foreign policy from 1958 to 1976.
Niv Allon is a fourth year Ph.D. Candidate at the Egyptology Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Yale University, and a 2012-2013 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, writing his dissertation on ‘Writing Images: Images of Writing in New Kingdom ancient Egypt (1550-1070 BCE).
Caitlín E. Barrett is Assistant Professor of Classics at Cornell University. She is the author of Egyptianizing Figurines from Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion (2011) and the co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays on the ritual uses of figurines; other publications deal with cult and society in Greco-Roman Egypt, interactions between Egypt and the rest of the eastern Mediterranean, and the archaeology of religion and ritual. She has also excavated and surveyed at a range of Bronze Age through early modern sites in Egypt, Greece, and the United States.
Marina Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in Egyptology at Yale University, currently completing her dissertation, entitled “Keeping Enemies Closer: the Role of the Foreigner in Ancient Egyptian Foreign Policy.” Her main research interests include expeditionary rock inscriptions, ancient Egyptian social policy, ancient Egyptian foreign policy, and Egypto-Nubian relations. Marina received her B.A. in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations from the University of Toronto in 2006, and her MPhil in Egyptology from Yale University in 2011.
Aaron Michael Butts is Lector of Semitics in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. His research focuses on Semitic linguistics as well as the history and literature of Christianity in the Near East, especially Syriac Christianity. He is author of Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Tower of Babel (2009) and a co-editor of The Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (2011). He is currently completing a project on the Greco-Roman context of the Syriac language.
Tasha Dobbin-Bennett is a Ph.D. candidate in Egyptology at Yale University. Her dissertation examines ancient Egyptian religious and medical texts, specializing in merging philology with biomedical theory. Her current research on Thomas Pettigrew and George Gliddon grew out of her interest in the influence nineteenth-century anatomical discussions have had on public perception of ancient Egyptian mummification.
John Coleman Darnell is Professor of Egyptology at Yale University and director of the Yale Egyptological Institute in Egypt. The author or co-author of nine books and author of dozens of scholarly articles, he has published widely on Egyptian religion and history, and on the development of Egyptian scripts. He is director of the Theban Desert Road Survey and Toshka Desert Road Survey, expeditions that have made several spectacular discoveries in the last two decades.
Maria Gutierrez is a Ph.D. candidate in Egyptology at Yale University. Her research interests include ancient Egyptian religious practices, Egyptian art and architecture, and Egyptian history in general. She is currently working on her dissertation, a study of Egyptian oracular practices from the New Kingdom to the Graeco-Roman period.
Stan Hendrickx is a lecturer in History of Art at the Media, Arts and Design Faculty (Hasselt, Belgium). He has participated in numerous excavation and survey projects throughout Egypt, and his research interests include Egyptian ceramics and Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egypt, as well as the study of early Egyptian iconography.
Nancy Arthur Hoskins, author of The Coptic Tapestry Albums and the Archaeologist of Antinoé, Albert Gayet, two weaving texts, chapters on Egyptian fabrics in four books, and articles on Tutankhamun, Coptic, and Early Islamic textiles, has an Interdisciplinary M.S. in Art History and Fine Arts/Weaving from the University of Oregon. She researched Egyptian textiles in over fifty museums and received grants from the Oregon Council for the Humanities and the Aziz S. and Lola Atiya Fund for Coptic Studies. In 2009 and 2010 Nancy led A Textile Tour of Egypt with additional time for museum research. The former college instructor, has presented lectures, taught weaving workshops, and exhibited her art fabrics nationally and internationally. As a guest speaker for the Echoes of Egypt exhibit Nancy presented “Coptic Fabrics and the Fauves.”
Julia Hsieh is a Ph.D. Candidate in Egyptology, specializing in the evolution of grammatical constructions, lexicography, and idiomatic expressions. Her research also focuses on state versus private religious beliefs as reflected in textual and archaeological evidence, and the application of modern scientific methods to Egyptian archaeology. Julia has a M.A. in Egyptology and Anthropology/Archaeology, and a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from the University of Auckland.
Eleanor Hughes is Associate Director of Exhibitions and Publications and Associate Curator at the Yale Center for British Art, where she has curated a number of exhibitions. In 2008 she served as in-house curator for The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, 1830-1925, and curated a complementary exhibition drawn from Yale collections, entitled Pearls to Pyramids: British Visual Culture and the Levant, 1600-1830. She is currently working on an edited volume of essays on the latter topic, and on a major loan exhibition and accompanying publication on eighteenth-century British marine painting.
Robert Grant Irving, Ph.D., was born in Hartford, Connecticut of Scottish-Canadian parents and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford; King's College, Cambridge; and Yale. He has taught at Yale, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Trinity College in Hartford, and the University of Virginia; has lectured on six continents; and has held research grants in India, Africa, Britain, and the United States, including a Fulbright Scholarship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His book Indian Summer, on the creation of New Delhi, won the British Council Prize in the Humanities, presented by the United Kingdom Government, and also the highest honor of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award.
Ashley Kargacin is a 2nd year Egyptology graduate student at Yale University. Her interests include the reflections of cultural and social changes as seen in Egyptian material cultural.
David Klotz is a postdoctoral research associate at Yale University. He has Copublished widely on temples and private statues from Graeco-Roman Egypt, and he directs the Yale University Nadura Temple Project in Kharga Oasis.
Elizabeth Lang is a third-year PhD student in Egyptology at Yale University. Her interests include ancient food and drink, social history, and popular religious and medical practices. She is originally from Regina, Canada.
Daniel Schriever is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. His research focuses on Christianity in Late Antiquity, with a particular emphasis on Egyptian monasticism.
Christina Smylitopoulos is a specialist in art and visual culture of the eighteenth century. She received her Ph.D. from McGill University and, before joining the art history faculty at the University of Guelph, was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art. Her current research traces the significance of Regency illustrated books, which occupy an unclear position in the trajectory from stand-alone Georgian graphic satire to the Victorian comic illustrated book.
Isabel Toral-Niehoff studied History and Arabic Studies in Tübingen (PhD 1997), Habilitation 2008 (FU Berlin). Her main publishing and research fields are: Arabia and the Near East in Late Antiquity; cultural identity; cultural transfer processes; Arabic Occult Sciences; Literature in translation; Al-Andalus. Since 2012 Marie-Curie Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Cultures at the Aga Khan University in London.
S. J. Wolfe is senior cataloguer and serials specialist at the American Antiquarian Society. She has had a lifetime interest in ancient Egypt and has lectured widely on the topic, particularly on the subject of the manufacture of paper from the wrappings of mummies. She is the author of Mummies in Nineteenth Century America: Ancient Egyptians as Artifacts (McFarland, 2009) and is currently working on a web version of EMINA, her extensive database of Egyptian mummies and mummy parts in North America.