Symposium 2022 Speaker biographies
The biographies of the 2022 Colloquium/Symposium weekend's speakers will appear here as the events are finalised.
The Symposium (Saturday, November 5)
Note: These are thumbnail bios and will be updated
Andrew Bednarski is an Egyptologist, nineteenth-century historian, and currently a Visiting Research Scholar at the American University in Cairo. He worked for many years for the American Research Center in Egypt, facilitating and directing projects in Cairo and Luxor. He has excavated at most of the major sites in Egypt and has lectured and published broadly on ancient Egypt and its reception in the modern world. His latest, co-authored book, A World History of Egyptology, is available through Cambridge University Press.
Peter Der Manuelian, joining us via Zoom, is Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology in both the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Anthropology Departments at Harvard University, and director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (https://hmane.harvard.edu). He was previously on the curatorial staff of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His Giza Project at Harvard (http://giza.fas.harvard.edu) aims to collect and present online all archaeological activity at the Giza Pyramids. His research and teaching interests include visualization and digital humanities approaches to the ancient world. Among his publications are Walking Among Pharaohs. George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology
(https://amzn.to/3wznjHy) Digital Giza. Visualizing the Pyramids; 30 Second Ancient Egypt; Mastabas of Nucleus Cemetery G 2100; Slab Stelae of the Giza Necropolis; Living in the Past: Studies in Archaism of the Egyptian Twenty-sixth Dynasty; and Studies in the Reign of Amenophis II. He has also written several children’s books.
Okasha el-Daly will join us by Zoom from London. He studied Egyptology at Cairo University and gained his PhD from the University College London (UCL) with a pioneering study of medieval Arabic writings on Ancient Egypt published by UCL in 2005 as “The Missing Millennium. Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings”. He taught in the UK, Egypt and Qatar and lectured in many Arab countries, USA and Europe. He has authored, edited and translated several works on Ancient Egypt. Okasha regularly leads study tours to Egypt.
Okasha worked as Director of Projectors at the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation (UK) and Qatar Museums. He is currently Head of Acquisitions at Qatar University Press. He authored, edited and translated several works on Ancient Egypt;
John Gee received his undergraduate degree from Yale University. He is currently William Gay Professor of Egyptology at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. He was formerly editor of the Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities (JSSEA), and is a member of the Society's Board of Trustees. He is a series editor for Studies in the Book of Abraham and a member of the editorial board of the Eastern Christian Texts series. He is also on the board of directors for the Aziz S. Atiya Fund for Coptic Studies at the University of Utah and has written an overview of Coptic literature.
Katja Goebs is an Associate Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her interests include ancient Egyptian Kingship and its associated rituals and iconography, Egyptian funerary beliefs and the texts and images describing them, the various forms and functions of Egyptian and other myths, as well as the history of especially German Egyptology and Archaeology. She is currently preparing, with Susanne Voss-Kern, an edited volume on the History and Impact of German Archaeology in the Near and Middle East.
Meira Gold is a historian of science with research expertise in colonial-era Egyptology. As of September 2022, she is an Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Gallatin School. Her first book, Archaeology from Ruins: Victorian Egyptology and the Making of a Colonial Field Science, provides a new critical account of the origins of British fieldwork in the Nile Delta from 1850 by examining its entanglement with contemporary sciences. She is a recent recipient of the Alexander Prize from the Royal Historical Society and the Nathan Reingold Prize from the History of Science Society for two interdisciplinary articles on the history of archaeology. She received her BA and MA in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations from the University of Toronto before completing her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge in 2020. She was subsequently a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Counsel of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at York University in Toronto. The SSEA awarded Dr. Gold the very first scholarship on her CV as an undergraduate, and she is thrilled to be speaking at this year’s symposium.
Jackie Jay, Ph.D. (2008, University of Chicago), is Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University. She is the author of Orality and Literacy in the Demotic Tales (Brill, 2016). In addition to her work on ancient Egyptian literature, her current research projects focus on the publication of Demotic ostraca and graffiti and women in the ancient world. An Ontario native, she has been a long-time member of the SSEA and a Trustee since November 2012.
Mohamed Ismael Khaled graduated at universities in Minia and Cairo. He acquired his Ph.D. at the Charles University in Prague, in the Czech Republic in 2009. Between 2014 and 2016 he had a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation at Würzburg University, where he has been a scientific researcher in the Egyptology Department, since 2018.
Mohamed is also a high official at the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. He served as the Director of Foreign Mission Affairs, as well as supervised the Development and Saite Management Project of the Pyramids on the Giza Plateau.
He is a specialist in the Old Kingdom. He is the director of the Abusir Project, excavating the pyramid complex of Sahura at Abusir. In 2018, he received an AEF grant to restore the substructure of the pyramid of Sahura, and his work inside the pyramid revealed much new evidence which has changed the current view of this monument.
Kerry Muhlestein received his B.S. from BYU in Psychology with a Hebrew minor, as well as an M.A. in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, and his Ph.D. from UCLA in Egyptology, where in his final year he was named the UCLA Affiliates Graduate Student of the Year. He is the director of the BYU Egypt Excavation Project, and a Vice President of the SSEA.