About
Fields of study:
Anthropological archaeology
Egyptology
About:
Janet Richards is Associate Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Associate Curator for Dynastic Egypt at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan. Educated at Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania in anthropology and Egyptology, she specializes in ancient northeast African archaeology and history, with special emphasis on conceptual landscapes, ideologies of power and responses to political crisis, the purposes of biography, and social transformations over time as materialized in mortuary and votive contexts. Since 1995, Richards has directed the University of Michigan Abydos Middle Cemetery Project, a large-scale investigation of a late Old Kingdom mortuary landscape. She has also participated in excavations in southern Illinois, and at Amarna, Deir el Ballas, and East Karnak, Egypt. She has curated several exhibitions at the Kelsey Museum including the recent new wing installation of the permanent galleries of dynastic Egyptian artifacts. Her publications include Society and Death in Ancient Egypt: mortuary landscapes of the Middle Kingdom (2005), and two co-edited volume Order, Legitimacy, and a co-edited volume, Wealth in Ancient States (2000) as well as a series of essays on ancient Egyptian archaeology and history. She is currently working on Writing Ancient Lives: Weni the Elder and Ancient Egyptian Responses to Political Crisis, a monograph under contract to Cambridge University Press.
Curriculum Vitae
View Janet Richards' CV
Education:
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1992
B.A. Northwestern University, 1981
Research Areas of Interest:
Ancient northeast African archaeology and history; conceptual landscapes; biography; political crisis; cultural heritage
