People

Project Collaborators

Peter Der Manuelian
Project Director
Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology, Harvard University
Director, Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East

Peter Der Manuelian is a Professor of Egyptology at Harvard, where he directs the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and the Giza Project. Before coming to Harvard in 2010, he was a Lecturer in Egyptology at Tufts University and a curator in the Egyptian department at the MFA, Boston, where he founded and directed the Giza Archives Project from 2000 to 2011. He has published extensively on the art and literature of ancient Egypt and the history of Egyptology, his research interests include the development of mortuary architecture, epigraphy, and the iconographic nature of Egyptian language and culture. He is an expert on the archaeology of Giza, the history of the HU-MFA Expedition, and the digital humanities. He is the author, most recently, of Walking Among Pharaohs: George Reisner and the Dawn of Modern Egyptology, published by Oxford University Press in 2023.

Wendy Doyon
Project Co-Director
CAORC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, American Research Center in Egypt

Wendy Doyon is an historian of modern Egypt and Egyptology, specializing in the history of archaeological labor and economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. She received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021, with a dissertation entitled Empire of Dust: Egyptian Archaeology and Archaeological Labor in Nineteenth-century Egypt. Her work is the first to examine the development of archaeology and antiquities management in relation to the history of Egyptian state and society under the Mehmed Ali dynasty. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow based in Cairo, where she is writing a book based on her doctoral research and completing the manuscript for an Arabic excavation diary in translation from Abu Geili, Sudan, in 1914. She is an expert on the history of the ruyasa-foremen from Quft and has written many research articles on the history of Egyptian archaeology. She is the website and social media director for Abydos Archaeology, where she writes the online dig diary at abydos.org.

Marleen De Meyer
Assistant Director for Egyptology and Archaeology, Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC)

Marleen De Meyer is an Egyptologist based in Cairo, where she has directed the Egyptian archaeology program at NVIC since 2016 under the aegis of Leiden University. Recently she held Distinguished Visiting Professorships in Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and at the University of Basel in Switzerland. She received her PhD in Egyptology from KU Leuven (2008), where she has co-directed archaeological research at the Middle Egyptian site of Deir el-Bersha for the past twenty years. She has published extensively on the archaeology of ancient Egypt, Egyptian funerary culture, and is an expert on the archaeology of Deir el-Bersha, one of the earliest excavation sites documented in Arabic by the HU-MFA Expedition in 1915. In recent years her research focus has come to include the history of Egyptology as co-director of the SURA-Project, in partnership with the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, and as a postdoctoral research fellow on the EOS-funded project ‘Pyramids and Progress: Belgian expansionism and the making of Egyptology, 1830-1952’ at KU Leuven.

Liesbeth Zack
Assistant Professor in Arabic Language and Linguistics, University of Amsterdam

Liesbeth Zack is an expert on Egyptian Arabic, both spoken and written, and Middle Arabic. Her research and publications focus on the historical stages and manuscript sources of Egyptian dialects. She is especially interested in the Ottoman period (from the sixteenth to the twentieth century) and has published extensively on materials from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She is currently working on a monograph about language change in Cairo in the nineteenth century, in which dialectology, historical sociolinguistics, and cultural studies are combined to explain linguistic change over time. In addition to historical linguistics, she is also interested in the use of modern Arabic dialect literature and code switching between Modern Standard Arabic and dialect. She teaches Arabic language and linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where she received her PhD in Arabic studies in 2009. She is the co-editor of Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic: Diachrony and Synchrony, published by Brill in 2012, and the founder of the University of Amsterdam research group Historical Sociolinguistics, in which she coordinates with experts on other languages (including English, Frisian, Afrikaans, Polish, and Quecha) to work on methodological issues in the field of sociolinguistics.

Mostafa Tolba
Archive Team Member, German Archaeological Institute in Cairo (DAIK)

Mostafa Tolba holds a BA in Egyptology from the Faculty of Archaeology at Cairo University and a joint MA in Environmental Archaeology from Cairo University and the University of Cologne. His thesis research was on Plant Iconography and Remains from the Tomb of Sennedjem (TT1) in Deir el-Medina, the results of which were recently published in Kingdom of the Mummies: Essays in Memory of Ramadan B. Hussein (CASAE 2024). He has received scholarships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Egypt Exploration Society (EES), and the British Council. He is currently a team member in the archives of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo (DAIK), where he has researched, published, and curated a recent exhibition on the Ahmed Fakhry Archive. He is also a member of the Saqqara Saite Tombs Project of the University of Tübingen and has previously worked on research projects in Germany and Egypt, including the Selim Hassan Archives at CULTNAT and the University of Cologne excavations at Zawyet Sultan.

Aya Ibrahim
Field Archaeologist

Aya Ibrahim received a joint MA in Environmental Archaeology from Cairo University and the University of Cologne in 2022 and holds a BA in Egyptology from Cairo University. Her thesis research analyzed a collection of lithic material from northern Sudan, now held in Cologne, Germany, where she studied from 2017 to 2019. She is currently a member of several archaeological excavations for the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo (DAIK), the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (Ifao), and the University of Hawaii excavations at Tell Timai.

Noha Mahran
Assistant Librarian, Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC)

Noha Mahran is an MA student in Environmental Archaeology at Cairo University and the University of Cologne, where she is writing a thesis on basketry in ancient Egypt. She holds a BA in Egyptology from Cairo University and has worked as an assistant librarian at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo since 2016, where she focuses primarily on the archival collection. She has received scholarships and professional archives training from the Egypt Exploration Society (EES), the University of Groningen, and the University of Cologne.

Geoff Emberling
Associate Research Scientist at the Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan

Geoff Emberling is Research Scientist and Lecturer in Mesopotamian and Nubian Archaeology at the University of Michigan, where he directs archaeological research on ancient Kush at Jebel Barkal in northern Sudan. He received his PhD in Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan and has directed archaeological excavations at Tell Brak in Syria (1998-2004), the fourth Nile cataract (2007-2008), el-Kurru (2013-2019), and Jebel Barkal (2019-present) in northern Sudan. His research interests include comparative perspectives on ancient cities, states, empires, and ethnicity with a particular focus on ancient cultures across the Middle East and North Africa. He has held research and teaching positions at the University of Copenhagen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, and has curated exhibitions and published extensively on the archaeology of ancient Nubia, the cultures of early Mesopotamia, and the politics of archaeology and museum display.

Nisha Kumar
PhD Candidate in Egyptology, Harvard University

Nisha Kumar is a PhD candidate at Harvard, where her research focuses on settlement archaeology, urbanism, craft production, and the material culture of ancient Egypt. She holds an MA in Ancient Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, where she studied both Egyptology and Arabic, and worked as a research assistant at the ISAC (formerly Oriental Institute). She has participated in many archaeological excavations in Greece, Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Egypt, the latter including the University of Alcalá Middle Kingdom Theban Project at Deir el-Bahari, the University of Arizona Egyptian Expedition at Luxor, and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU excavations at Abydos.

Matthew Cook
Digital Scholarship Program Manager, Harvard University Library

Matt Cook is an emerging technologies researcher, developer, and consultant, as well as a web publishing advisor at mncook.net. He received an MA in Philosophy (2012) and an MLIS (2019) from the University of Oklahoma, combining interests in digital scholarship, 3D data, and the philosophy of mind. He has expertise in the development and management of digital and virtual reality platforms for helping researchers interact with textual source material, 3D data, and special collections in architecture, chemistry, information science, and a range of humanities fields. He is especially interested in automated workflows that combine the use of handwriting transcription technologies, AI, and the metaverse.