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Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Curator for Dynastic Egypt at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow - Class of Spring 2014


Janet Richards is Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Curator for Dynastic Egypt at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1992) and Northwestern University (BA, 1981), she specializes in ancient northeast African archaeology and history, with emphasis on conceptual landscapes, ideologies of power, responses to political crisis, the purposes of biography, and social transformations over time as materialized in mortuary and votive contexts. She has curated several exhibitions at the Kelsey Museum, including the new wing installation of the permanent galleries of dynastic Egyptian artifacts. Her publications (all with Cambridge University Press) include the co-edited volume Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States (2000), Society and Death in Ancient Egypt: Mortuary Landscapes of the Middle Kingdom (2005), and the monograph Writing Ancient Lives: Weni the Elder and Ancient Egyptian Responses to Political Crisis.

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