Janet Richards

Janet Richards is a professor of Egyptology in the Department of Middle East Studies and curator for Dynastic Egypt at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD in anthropology and Oriental studies, 1992), Northwestern University (BA in anthropology and French, 1981), l’École du Louvre, and l’Université de Paris-IV, she specializes in ancient northeast African archaeology and history, with emphasis on conceptual landscapes and verbal and spatial rhetorics of response to political crisis, biography and local saint cults, archaeology in popular culture, and the past as cultural heritage in the past and present. Since 1995 Richards has directed the University of Michigan’s Abydos Middle Cemetery Project in southern Egypt, a large-scale investigation of a late third–early second millennium BC mortuary and votive landscape. At the Kelsey Museum, she has curated or co-curated several exhibitions, most recently Discovery! Excavating the Ancient World.

Her publications include the co-edited volume Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States (Cambridge U. Press 2000), Society and Death in Ancient Egypt: Mortuary Landscapes of the Middle Kingdom (Cambridge 2005), and the monograph in preparation Writing Ancient Lives: Weni the Elder, Local Saints, and Ancient Egyptian Responses to Political Crisis (Cambridge). She has received fellowships and grants from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Geographic Society, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the American Academy in Berlin.