Notes on contributors
M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro is a Junior Research Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She holds a PhD degree in Egyptology from Brown University (2022). Her main research interests involve the intersection of language and mind which she explores using Discourse Analysis, Politeness, and other pragmatic strategies, and the embeddedness of cultural memory and knowledge in iconographical script. She has authored more than twenty publications, is assistant editor of the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, has taught at Brown University for three years, and collaborates with archaeological missions in Giza (Egypt), and Nuri (Sudan).
Christelle Alvarez (DPhil, University of Oxford) is Assistant Professor of Egyptology at Brown University. Her interests focus primarily on ancient Egyptian philology, epigraphy, beliefs and practices, and the socio-historical context of the 3rd millennium BCE. She is a member of the Mission archéologique franco-suisse de Saqqâra and currently directing the work at the pyramid of Qakare Ibi in South Saqqara. Before coming to Brown, she worked with the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Episteme in motion. Transfer of knowledge from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period’ at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She is also a member of the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures at the University of Oxford.
Veronika Dulíková graduated in Egyptology—Islamic history and culture at the Charles University in Prague, where she acquired her PhD in Egyptology. She focuses on history, archaeology, and above all in society, material culture, prosopography, administration and Complex Network Analyses in the Old Kingdom. She created and maintains the database named Maat-base comprising data on more than 8,000 Old Kingdom officials, their titles and family relations. She applies the Complex Network Analysis method to the Old Kingdom society in close collaboration with cyberneticists and mathematicians. Since 2010, she has been a member of archaeological missions in Egypt (Abusir).
Gersande Eschenbrenner Diemer (doctor in Egyptology from Lyon 2 University, France), a former Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University College of London (TRACER Project funded by the European Council—project n°536344) and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jaén (Acción 6 Plan Propio de Investigación), is currently a Maria Zambrano Researcher at the University of Alcalá, and an associate researcher at ArScAN laboratory (CNRS-UMR 7041). She is member of the MORTEXVAR project (2018-T1/HUM-10215 Talento Programme, funded by Madrid Region) and coordinator of the axe Materiality for the Research Network RIIPOA (
Carlos Gracia Zamacona (PhD in Egyptology from the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2008) is director of the Earlier Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Texts Variability (MORTEXVAR) project (Atracción de Talento Programme, Region of Madrid, 2019–2024), co-organiser of the Red Iberoamericana de Investigadores en Próximo Oriente Antiguo (RIIPOA), co-editor of the series Estudios Orientales—Monografías RIIPOA, and epigrapher for the Middle Kingdom Theban Project excavations at Deir el-Bahari. Carlos’ interests are verbal semantics, metaphorical thinking, textual patterns and uses, graphemics and religious thought as well as its reinterpretation. He is the author of Manual de egipcio medio (Archaeopress, 2017) and Los Textos de los Ataúdes del Egipto antiguo: variabilidad, legitimación y diálogo (SBL, 2024).
Jorke Grotenhuis is a postdoctoral researcher, part of the iClassifier project in the ArchaeoMind Lab, under supervision of Prof. Dr. Orly Goldwasser at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a PhD in Languages, Literatures and translation studies from the University of Liège (2021). His main interests are variation in the language and how it can be used to further the understanding of Ancient Egypt. Additionally he has a keen interest in digital humanities, beside being a part of the Thot Sign List, and part of the effort to add an extension to the Hieroglyphic repertoire in Unicode.
César Guerra Méndez has a MA degree in Egyptology from the University of Liverpool and is currently part of the OCR-PT-CT project team at Universidad de Alcalá. He also actively collaborates with the MORTEXVAR project. César complements his Egyptological activity with studies in computer science, with the intention of specializing in Digital Humanities. His previous articles and conferences have dealt with diverse topics, but orbiting around the Egyptian Netherworld and funerary culture.
Julia Hamilton is a lecturer in Egyptology in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She was the Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten (NINO) Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University (2020–2022), with a project centred on graffiti from Old Kingdom monuments at Saqqara. She has DPhil from the University of Oxford (2020) and MA in Ancient History from the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is currently working on a monograph under contract with Bloomsbury entitled Lives and afterlives of ancient Egyptian names, which is a socio-anthropological study of ancient Egyptian personal names.
Elisabeth Kruck (PhD in Egyptology from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 2018) is University Research Assistant in Egyptian Archaeology, Institut für Ägyptologie, Universität Wien and since 2022 Deputy Field Director of the Middle Egypt Project el-Sheikh Fadl of the University of Vienna. As Archaeologist she has worked for various missions in Thebes (German Archaeological Institut; Middle Kingdom Theban Project) and her research focus lies on ritual practices in the burial context with view to archaeological, pictorial and textual sources. She is the author of Eindrücke. Grabkegel als Elemente thebanischer Grabarchitektur (AV 124, 2012) and Beigabe und Abbild—Aspekte und Konzepte ungestörter Bestattungen aus Saqqara und Abusir (
Anne Landborg is a doctor in Egyptology from University of Liverpool (Manifestations of the Dead in Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, 2014) with a MA in Egyptology from Uppsala University, Sweden. Former employments include University of Liverpool, Uppsala University and University of Birmingham, where she has taught religion, art, history, literature, and language. Her research interests are within Egyptian religion where she focuses on textual and epigraphic data to investigate mechanisms of ritual practices, how identities were presented in texts and art, and how religious texts were used and transmitted over different periods.
Angela McDonald is a Senior Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Glasgow. She has an MPhil (1998) and a DPhil (2002) in Egyptology from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis was on Animal Metaphor in the Egyptian determinative system, and she maintains a keen interest in the graphic communication of meaning (both within the determinative system and beyond it) in the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts. Angela works closely with The Hunterian in the University of Glasgow, and has published on their glass artefacts from Gurob (in collaboration with Tori Kemp and Andrew Shortland, Cranfield University) and their hieratic holdings (with Andrew Mills). She is the author of the bestselling Write Your Own Egyptian Hieroglyphs (2007, British Museum Press).
Juan Carlos Moreno García (PhD in Egyptology, 1995) is a CNRS senior researcher at the Sorbonne University in Paris. He has published extensively on pharaonic administration, socio-economic history, landscape organization and the structure of the state. Recent publications include Power and Regions in Ancient States: An Egyptian and Mesoamerican Perspective (2022), Markets and Exchanges in Pre-modern and Traditional Societies (2021) and The State in Ancient Egypt: Power, Challenges and Dynamics (2019). He is also chief editor of The Journal of Egyptian History (Brill) and editor of the series “Elements: Ancient Egypt in Context” (Cambridge University Press) and “Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Societies” (Oxbow Books).
Jean-Pierre Pätznick made his PhD at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) with the topic Die Siegelabrollungen und Rollsiegl der Stadt Elephantine im 3. Jahrtausend v. Chr.: Spurensicherung eines archäologischen Artefaktes (BAR IS 1339, Archaeopress, Oxford, 2005). Involving three parameters, the archaeological context, the epigraphy–palaeography and the typology, he developped a new chronostratigraphical method to study a sigillographic material in urban context. Since 2014, he is researcher and scientific member of the Laboratory Mondes pharaoniques, Sorbonne, Paris IV, where he is the promotor of the project DICTHICOM—Dictionnaire de l’Egyptien Thinite Commenté—Dictionary of the Early Dynastic Egyptian Language: Texts and Comments. He is also currently involved in the study and publication of The Seals of the Old Kingdom Town at Buhen (EES) as well as of the sigillographic materials at Adaïma (IFAO), Gebelein (Gebelein Archaeological Project) and Tell el-Amarna (Amarna Project). His main interests concern, among others, the Ancient Egypt’s sigillography, epigraphy, palaeography, the Early Dynastic Period—history, archaeology, religion, epigraphy, society (social structures, gender studies)—as well as the origins of the ancient egyptian civilisation, Predynastic, the Intermediate Periods of Pharaonic Egypt and the relations between Egypt and its neighbours.
Marie Peterková Hlouchová graduated in Egyptology and History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, where she also finished the doctoral study programme. She focuses on Old Kingdom religion and is interested also in wooden coffins from the Old Kingdom and the first millennium BC. Since 2015 she has participated in archaeological excavations in Egypt and Sudan. She is an editor of Prague Egyptological Studies. She was also one of the organisers of the international student conference Current Research in Egyptology (CRE) 2018 in Prague; in 2018–2020, she was a member of the CRE’s Permanent Committee.
Dina Serova holds a PhD in Northeast African Archaeology and Cultural Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In her doctoral thesis ‘Nudity in Ancient Egypt: Epistemes, Lexemes and (Re-)Constructions’ under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Frank Kammerzell and Prof. Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert, she dealt with body conceptualizations in a diachronic perspective in considering a wide range of material such as texts, images and archaeological remains, as well as the confrontation with these primary sources in the archaeological discourses. Currently, she holds a position as a postdoctoral researcher in Egyptology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and in the CRC 1412 ‘Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation’ where she investigates register knowledge and variation in Ancient Egyptian narrative texts. Dina Serova is also actively participating in various research projects such as the ‘Middle Kingdom Theban Project’ led by Antonio J. Morales or as co-organizer of the working group on ‘Multimodal Communication in Ancient Egypt’.
Seria Yamazaki is an assistant professor (tenure track) at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. She is interested in Middle Kingdom funerary culture, including the performance of funerary rituals, funerary jewelry, and the coffin decorations called object friezes. She participated in the excavations at Dahshur North for several years. She received a bachelor’s degree as well as a master’s degree in literature (archaeology) from Waseda University. Her doctoral thesis was on Middle Kingdom funerary ritual focused on coffin decorations and three-dimensional grave goods, and she obtained her Ph.D. in 2021 at Waseda University.