Symposium Speakers
Dr. Anne Austin (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Missouri-St. Louis).
Anne Austin received her B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University, and she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in the Archaeology program at UCLA. She joined the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2017 after completing a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in the History Department. Her 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. While working in Egypt, Anne discovered the only known ancient Egyptian tattoos on a mummy with over 30 different tattoos. Anne's next research project will focus on the practice of tattooing in ancient Egypt and its potential connections to gender, religion, and medicine. In addition to her interested in Egyptology and osteology, Anne works on improving archaeological data management practices through her participation in an international, collaborative ethnographic research study on archaeological field schools. http://anneeaustin.com/
Dr. Bryan Brinkman (Missouri State University). Dr. Brinkman teaches in the departments of History and Modern and Classical Languages at Missouri State University. He was awarded his Ph.D. in Ancient History (a joint History-Classics program) from Brown University. His research focuses primarily on mass communication in the Roman Empire, including collective vocalization and epigraphy. He also has a long-standing interest in the reception of Egyptian religion in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. His primary aim as an educator is to help students make connections between the events of the past and the necessity for individual action to enact change.
Dr. Sarah Chapman (University of Kansas Libraries). Dr. Chapman is an Egyptologist and funerary archaeologist. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham in Ancient History, Classics and Archaeology, with a focus on Egyptology, a M.A. in Egyptian Art and Archaeology from the University of Memphis, and a B.A. from the Washington University-St. Louis. Her research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to examine Egyptian funerary ritual during the first millennium BC. Her focus is the materiality of the body and the specific roles it played in Egyptian funerary religion. She also specializes in advanced digital imaging methods, including photography and editing, along with methods of computational photography such as 3D modeling (via photogrammetry) and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI). Sarah currently works as the Digitization Coordinator for University of Kansas Libraries.
Stacy Davidson has been the resident Egyptologist for the Continuing Education Department at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS, since 2011; she is also an adjunct professor in the History Department at JCCC. During the summer she teaches a variety of day camps on the ancient world for children ages 11-14 through the Summer Youth Program at JCCC. Her teaching methodology is oriented towards bringing Egyptology down from the "Ivory Tower" and finding innovative and novel ways to engage non-traditional learners of all ages and backgrounds. As a member of the Humanities Kansas Speakers Bureau, she brings ancient Egypt to life in underserved communities throughout Kansas. Her professional memberships include the International Association of Egyptologists, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Mid-American Chapter of the American Translators Association (MICATA). Visit http://blogs.jccc.edu/sdavid22/ for more.
Dr. Lisa Saladino Haney is a lecturer and Egyptologist in the greater Kansas City area. She is a specialist in the art and archeology of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom and she has worked as an archaeologist and epigrapher in Egypt and Oman. Her forthcoming monograph, Visualizing Coregency: An Exploration of the Link between Royal Image and Co-Rule during the Reign of Senwosret III and Amenemhet III, examines the practice of co-rule during the 12th Dynasty and the role of royal statuary in expressing the dynamics of shared power.
Rozanne Klinzing. Rozanne holds an MBA in Finance and Accounting and has taken courses in History and Art History at the Johnson County Community College and at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. She has been a docent at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art since 2012, where she has given a number of talks and tours related to her interest in Egyptian art and developing visual thinking strategies.
Dr. Victor Matthews (Missouri State University) is Dean of the College of Humanities and Public Affairs and Professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University. Dr. Matthews holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. His publication record, scholarly contributions, and services to the field are too extensive to relate here, but can be found at https://www.missouristate.edu/relst/victormatthews.aspx .
Dr. Kathleen Sheppard (Missouri University of Science and Technology).
Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma. Her teaching focuses mainly on the broad survey of the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught surveys on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science.
Her research focuses on 19th and 20th century Egyptology and women in the field. Her first book (2013) was a scientific biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain. Murray’s career spanned 70 years and over 40 publications. She is also the editor of a collection of letters between Caroline Ransom Williams, the first university-trained American Egyptologist, and James Breasted from the University of Chicago (2018). Sheppard is a contributing editor to the online magazine Lady Science, which focuses on issues that women have faced, and continue to encounter, in the sciences. Currently Sheppard is working on a monograph about hotels in Egypt as sites of knowledge creation in Egyptology during the discipline’s “Golden Age,” around 1880 to 1930.
Dr. Julia Troche (Assistant Professor of History, Missouri State University) is an Egyptologist and social historian whose primary research has focused on how power structures and mortuary culture intersected in the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Currently, she is actively working on an ancient Egyptian XR video game (with Eve Weston) that is built as an instructional tool and is continuing her research on so-called pilgrim grooves at Karnak. She is also finishing up an article on funerary cones, an artifact corpus about which she is irrationally excited. Dr. Troche is deeply invested in education at all levels and seeks to develop pedagogy that encourages challenging content- and skill-driven learning, that is also fun and accessible.
https://history.missouristate.edu/JuliaTroche.aspx
Clara Wright. Clara Wright is a Hanna Holborn Gray Research Fellow and recent graduate of Bryn Mawr College where she double majored in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology & Classical Cultures and Societies. During her undergraduate degree, she studied in the Egyptology programs at the University of Pennsylvania and the American University in Cairo, as well as classics with the Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study in Rome. While at Bryn Mawr, Clara completed a thesis on Cleopatra VII’s political influence on the Isis cult in Italy and established The Bryn Mawr College Magic Lantern Slide Digitization Project. Clara is passionate about diversifying our understanding of the ancient world to one which includes the narratives of disenfranchised members of societies including women, enslaved people, and the working class. Additionally, she has a strong interest in using the study of the past to empower people today by making information on the ancient world accessible to rural and underprivileged communities.
