Wednesday 15 March 2023, at 7:00pm Cairo time, Virtual Event
Register here for the Zoom discussion

Mariam F. Ayad, editor of Women in Ancient Egypt: Revisiting Power, Agency, And Autonomy (AUC Press, 2022), a volume of cutting-edge research by twenty-four international scholars on female power, agency, health, and literacy in ancient Egypt, will talk about the book with three of the volume’s contributors.

The panelists will include Anne Austin, assistant professor of anthropology and archaeology, University of Missouri, Susan Kelly, early career Researcher–Egyptologist, and Kathrin Gabler, Egyptologist and associate professor, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen.

Click here to read more about Women in Ancient Egypt.

 

Biographies:

 

• Mariam F. Ayad is an associate professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. In 2020–21, she was a visiting associate professor of women’s studies and Near Eastern religions and a research associate of the Women’s Studies in Religion program at Harvard Divinity School. Ayad studied Egyptology at the American University in Cairo (BA), the University of Toronto (MA), and Brown University (PhD), and was a tenured associate professor of art history and Egyptology at the University of Memphis, Tennessee before returning to Egypt in 2011. She is the author of God’s Wife, God’s Servant: The God’s Wife of Amun (c. 740–525 BC) (2009) and the editor of three volumes on Coptic culture.

 

• Anne Austin received her BA in anthropology from Harvard University, and her MA and PhD in the archaeology program at UCLA. Before starting her position as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, Anne completed a three-year postdoctoral program in the History Department at Stanford University. Anne’s research combines the fields of osteology and Egyptology in order to document medicine and disease in the past. Specifically, she uses data from ancient Egyptian human remains and daily life texts to reconstruct ancient Egyptian health care networks and identify the diseases and illnesses people experienced in the past. Her current research project explores how the practice of tattooing in ancient Egypt connects to gender, religion, and medicine. In addition to her interest in Egyptology and osteology, Anne also works on improving archaeological data management practices through her participation in an international, collaborative ethnographic research study on archaeological field schools called the Secret Life of Data (SLO-Data) Project.

 

• Susan Anne Kelly is an Early Career Researcher–Egyptologist whose PhD dissertation, “Female Engagement in Domains of Social Power in Ancient Egypt’s Dynasties 1–6: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Women’s Titles,” advanced a theoretical study of ancient biographical inscriptions that offer new perspectives into women’s involvement, influence, and impact in the state’s socioeconomic structure in early Egypt (conferred in June 2021); she has been granted a fellowship at Macquarie University to publish the thesis. She has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Dendera and has presented her research at several international conferences including CRE Naples 2017; Australasian Egyptology Conference 5, Auckland; and Women in Ancient Egypt: Current Research and Historical Trends at the American University in Cairo in 2019. She became an invitational lecturer at Macquarie University for their Women and Gender in Ancient History unit in 2018 and presented to the Graduate Seminar in Oxford in 2019.

 

• Kathrin Gabler is an academic assistant and lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Basel. She has taught courses for nonacademic audiences at the universities of Basel, HU Berlin, Liège, and LMU Munich, the State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich, and the Antikenmuseum Basel. Trained at the universities of Munich and Leiden, her education culminated in a PhD entitled “Who’s Who around Deir el-Medina.” The thesis deals with the supply personnel of this extraordinary settlement from prosopographic, organizational, archaeological, and diachronic points of view. Furthermore, Kathrin was a regular member of the excavation projects at Deir al-Bachit/Dra’ Abu el-Naga and of the British Museum Epigraphic and Conservation Survey at Elkab and Hagr Edfu. Her post-doctoral project, “Means of Communication with a Focus on Letters, Gender, and the New Kingdom,” forms part of the “Crossing Boundaries Project: Understanding Complex Scribal Practices in Ancient Egypt” between the Universities of Basel and Liège and the Museo Egizio Turin. In addition, Kathrin directs a digital survey in the tomb of the sculptor Ipuy, TT 217, in Deir al-Medina.

 

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