Overview
I grew up in Singapore and studied at the University of Oxford (DPhil, 2022). My research and teaching center on ancient Egyptian religion and visual culture, with a focus on the second millennium BCE. I often adopt approaches informed by social anthropology and the history of art, and draw comparisons with early Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican cultures.
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. I am preparing a book that 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.
Research Focus
- Ancient Egyptian religion, visual culture, texts
- Materiality and multimodality
- Sensory archaeology
- Comparative approaches to early cultures
Publications
Books
[submitted] 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]
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