Creating Nubia: How Colonialism, Tourism, and Archaeology Made a Region, a Past, and a People,

On Thursday, October 19, William Carruthers, University of Essex, will give a lecture on the impact of the Aswan Dam and the flooding of Nubian settlements. "Creating Nubia: How Colonialism, Tourism, and Archaeology Made a Region, a Past, and a People" will explore how, In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the building and heightening of the Aswan Dam under the oversight of British engineers (and, later, Egyptian capital) radically altered the relationship of the region of Nubia to Egypt. Flooding Nubian settlements and causing the population to move their homes higher up the banks of the Nile, the dam’s increasingly high floodwaters constituted Nubia within imaginaries of (ancient) Egypt itself.  Carruthers is the author of "Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology," published in 2022 by Cornell University Press. Read more here.

The lecture is 5 to 6:30 p.m., Thursday, October 19, in the Hatcher Library Gallery. Reception and gallery exhibit opening to follow.

This event is free and open to the public.