Overview
My research and teaching center on ancient Egyptian religion and visual culture of the second millennium BCE. My approach is informed by social anthropology and the history of art, and I often draw comparisons with other cultures, from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica. My current book project explores ancient Egyptian and Classic Maya concepts and experiences surrounding what we call hieroglyphs. What did it mean to write, and what counted as writing, in these cultures? What can writing be and do?
I have published on amuletic imagery, prehistoric art, oral and literary traditions, historical consciousness, as well as conceptualization and discursive forms in Egyptian religion. Other ongoing research integrates ancient Egypt into large-scale interdisciplinary projects associated with Seshat: Global History Databank, building on my previous contributions to the Database of Religious History.
I grew up in Singapore and took my degrees from the University of Oxford. Before joining Cornell, I was a Research Associate at the Faculty of Classics and St John’s College in the University of Cambridge (2023–2025), where I contributed to the project Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems.
Research Focus
- Materiality and multimodality
- Sensory archaeology
- Constructing and representing knowledge in ancient Egypt
- Comparative approaches to early cultures
Publications
Books
[under review] A Palette of Scripts: Writing in and around the Iron Age Mediterranean. Co-authored with Colton Siegmund, Philip Boyes, and Philippa Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[in preparation] Seeing Signs: An Anthropology of Hieroglyphic Writing in Egyptian and Maya Antiquity (working title). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Edited volume
2023. Writing Orality. Co-edited with Bernardo Ballesteros Petrella, Domenico Giordani, James Parkhouse, and Flaminia Pischedda. Manuscript and Text Cultures special issue 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.56004/v2.2
Articles and chapters
[in press] Graphic worlds in the Book of Two Ways. In: Visual Aesthetics of Ancient Egyptian Writing, edited by Stephen Quirke, Rita Lucarelli, and Hany Rashwan. London; New York: Routledge. [c. 8,500 words]
[submitted] Looking at lines in ancient Egyptian writing. [c. 8,500 words]
[submitted] Red figures and cosmographic knowledge in the Amduat. [c. 8,500 words]
[submitted] Empire and religion in Thutmosid Egypt. [c. 12,000 words]
[forthcoming] Geographies of knowledge: on serpent limbs and loose ends. In: Meeting the Other: Transfers and Interactions around the Nile Valley, edited by Elena Panaite. Polish Publications in Mediterranean Archaeology. Leuven: Peeters. [c. 8,500 words]
2025. Comparing images, bodies, and ontologies in ancient Egypt and in Egyptology. Interdisciplinary Egyptology special issue 2 (2): 90–109. https://doi.org/10.25365/integ.2025.x2.6
2025. A bookish burial: kings, scribes, and the Amduat catalog. In: Looking Beyond the Text: New Approaches to Scribal Culture and Practices in Ancient Egypt, 32–64, edited by Margaret Geoga, Aurore Motte, and Judith Jurgens. Harvard Egyptological Studies 27. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004723405_004
2023. A predynastic Egyptian fish–antelope composite figure. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 109 (1–2): 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/03075133231172791
2022. Patterns and practices of sign-form variation: selected examples of the qjs logogram from the Fifth to Nineteenth Dynasties. Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 149 (2): 213–227. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaes-2021-0001
2021. Emblematic representation on ancient Egyptian apotropaic wands. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 36 (2): 119–141. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.86209