Notes on Contributors
Jennifer Miyuki Babcock is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute. She also teaches classes at New York University and The Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Before teaching, Dr. Babcock was a Postdoctoral Curatorial Associate at The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University and held research and fellowship positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Brooklyn Museum. She earned her Ph.D. at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Dr. Babcock is the author of Animal Fables in Ancient Egypt: Tree Climbing Hippos and Ennobled Mice (Brill 2022), which examines how drawings of anthropomorphized animals are linked to oral folklore and the religious environment of New Kingdom Thebes.
Miroslav Bárta is a professor of Egyptology at Charles University in Prague. In addition, he has been directing archaeological excavations at Abusir, Egypt. Dr. Bárta specializes in third millennium Egypt. His scientific pursuits include a comparative study of civilizations from a multidisciplinary perspective. He is the author or co-author of almost twenty monographs and dozens of articles, including excavation reports and theoretical studies dealing with seven laws determining the evolution of civilizations, climate change, and adaptation strategies.
Lisa Saladino Haney is an assistant curator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. She received her Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Pennsylvania; she also holds an M.A. in Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian Studies and a concentration in Museum Studies from New York University and a B.A. in Antiquities from Missouri State University. Dr. Haney has excavated in Egypt and Oman, and her research has focused largely on the archaeology and material culture of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (c. 2030–1650 B.C.E.), particularly the reign of Senwosret III. Her research utilizes archaeology, textual sources, and material culture to examine how the kings of Egypt’s 12th Dynasty chose to have themselves represented and why.
Zahi Hawass is a world-renowned and award-winning archaeologist. He has served as the Minister of State for Antiquities and Director of Excavations at Giza, Saqqara, the Valley of the Kings, the West Valley, the Lost Golden City, and the Bahariya Oasis. During his long career, he has written numerous scholarly articles and is highly respected as an Egyptologist whose enthusiasm has inspired many through his popular books, articles, and television appearances. His efforts to conserve and protect Egypt’s monuments have resulted in major projects, both completed and ongoing, throughout the country.
Briana C. Jackson holds a Ph.D. in Egyptian art and archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her Egyptological research interests focus on Amarna period art and religion and international relations during the New Kingdom. She also incorporates archaeogaming into her research, examining state development and power systems in city-building video games and representations of archaeology and “found experience” in puzzle adventure video games. She has taught several courses on art history, Egyptian art, and Roman history throughout New York and Hartford, Connecticut, and she is the inaugural Digital Humanities research fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt.
Lucie Vendelová Jirásková graduated in Egyptology and History and Culture of Islamic Countries at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in 2008. In 2021, she completed her Ph.D. studies in Egyptology there. Since 2010, she has participated in the excavations of the Czech Institute of Egyptology at Abusir. She focuses on the development of ancient Egyptian society and culture in the Early Dynastic period and the Old Kingdom. She specializes in the development and interpretation of stone vessels within material culture, particularly their production and distribution strategies.
Janice Kamrin holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include Middle Kingdom tomb art, the archaeology of Thebes, and the funerary arts of the first millennium. She is currently a curator in the Department of Egyptian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she oversees matters related to The Museum System (TMS) and technology in general. She is a member of the Joint Expedition to Malqata, the festival city of Amenhotep III, and is working on projects related to the archives of The Met’s early twentieth century Egyptian Expedition. Before coming to The Met, Janice directed several projects at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo for the American Research Center in Egypt and worked closely with Zahi Hawass, former head of the antiquities service. She is on the board of the American Research Center in Egypt.
Sophia E. Kroft is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University where she received her M.A. in Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology under the supervision of Dr. David O’Connor. She graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in French and Art and Archaeology, for which she studied Paleolithic French cave paintings and participated in the excavation of a Paleolithic site in southwest France. Her current areas of research include Predynastic Egyptian visual culture and the exploration of ancient painting techniques and materials via experimental archaeology. She has held teaching assistant positions for undergraduate courses in ancient Egyptian art and western art history as well as the Marica & Jan Vilcek Curatorial Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Mark Lehner received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1991. He is Director and President of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, Inc. (AERA). He is also an Associate at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago. AERA sponsors the Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP), which conducts excavations of Old Kingdom settlements near the Sphinx and Pyramids with an interdisciplinary and international team of archaeologists, geochronologists, botanists, and faunal specialists. He has published books and articles on ancient Egypt and conducted forty-three years of research at the Giza Pyramids.
Heather L. McCarthy received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has written about Ramesside queens’ tombs, the female pharaoh Tawosret, the Valley of the Kings, the impact of gender on ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs, Ramesside temple battle scenes, and Egyptian temple cosmology. Dr. McCarthy has received the American Research Center in Egypt Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Samuel Kress Fellowship in Egyptian Art and Architecture. She has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute’s Valley of the Queens Project, and is the deputy director of the New York University Expedition to the Ramesses II Temple at Abydos, where she helped document the temple’s decorative program for its recent republication.
Elizabeth McGovern is an art historian and anthropologist specializing in the art and archaeology of ancient Egypt. Her research focuses on the representation, use, and reception of costume in the New Kingdom, with a particular focus on the Tombs of the Nobles. She is particularly interested in how costume was used to communicate information about the wearer. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2001) and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2019).
Mohamed Megahed graduated with degrees in Egyptian Archaeology and Art History from universities in Minya and Cairo and acquired his Ph.D. in Egyptology from Charles University, Prague in 2016. He specializes, above all, in the archaeology, architecture, and decoration of the Old Kingdom pyramid complexes. He directs the project of the exploration, documentation, and conservation of the royal cemetery of King Djedkare-Isesi at south Saqqara, and he is the Deputy Director of the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Prague mission in Abusir.
Adela Oppenheim is a curator in the Egyptian Art Department of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She co-directs The Met’s excavations at the Middle Kingdom pyramid complex of Pharaoh Senwosret III at Dahshur (with curator emeritus Dieter Arnold), where her work focuses on the fragmentary relief decoration and sculpture from the king’s temples. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. from New York University, and her M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Oppenheim has written and lectured extensively on Middle Kingdom art and the results of the Dahshur excavations. She was co-curator of The Met’s 2015–2016 exhibition Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom (with curator emerita Dorothea Arnold). Currently she is working on the decoration of the mastabas excavated north of the Senwosret III complex and the Middle Kingdom models from the Theban tomb of Meketre.
Tara Prakash is an assistant professor at the College of Charleston. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University with a specialty in the art and archaeology of ancient Egypt. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Johns Hopkins University, and she was the W. Benson Harer Egyptology Scholar in Residence at California State University, San Bernardino in 2019–2020. Her research and publications focus on issues of ethnicity and identity, foreign interactions, artistic agency, kingship, and the visualization of pain and emotion in ancient Egypt. She is also the author of Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues: Fragments of the Late Old Kingdom (Lockwood Press, 2022), which is the first comprehensive study of the prisoner statues, a unique series of Egyptian statues that depict kneeling bound foreigners.
Catharine H. Roehrig received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. While there, she worked on the Theban Mapping Project where she became interested in the development of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. After finishing her coursework, she worked in the Egyptian Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on the exhibition Mummies & Magic: The Funerary Arts of Ancient Egypt. She was hired in 1989 by the Egyptian Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York where, among other things, she organized the exhibition Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh and spent nine seasons on the Museum’s Malqata Expedition. She retired in July 2019.
Emily Smith-Sangster is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Her current research focuses on questions of gender, identity, and landscape as manifest in the funerary practices of the New Kingdom. Her dissertation aims to explore these themes at Upper Egyptian sites, with a particular focus on Abydos. Emily received her B.A. (Highest Honors) in Anthropology from Monmouth University’s Honors School and her M.A. in Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian Studies from New York University.
Paul Edmund Stanwick is a scholar of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. He is a visiting scholar at New York University and Treasurer of the American Research Center in Egypt. He holds a Ph.D. in Ancient Egyptian and Roman Art History and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Bruce Williams is a research associate at the Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology and an associate at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Near East Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Previously, he was an assistant curator in the Egyptian Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and as part of the Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition Publication Project from 1976–1990, he prepared reports on archaeological excavations in the Aswan High Dam reservoir area in Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia. He has more recently resumed work on this project to report on excavations in Sudan at Serra East and in the Fourth Cataract reservoir area above the Merowe Dam. He has participated in excavations in Turkey, Egypt, and Sudan and co-directed excavations in the Fourth Cataract in 2007 and 2008.