Ancient Egypt and the Nile

Amy Butner received a PhD in ancient Egyptian art from Emory University and a master’s in Egyptian hieroglyphs from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Her dissertation focused on the decoration and design of the non-royal tombs of Amarna, an ancient city on the east bank of the Nile. More recently she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In addition to traditional academic methodologies, Amy incorporates new technologies such as 3D printing, 3D scanning, and 3D modeling in her work. Her research has taken her all over the world at major academic institutions as well as on-site throughout Egypt. She has working knowledge of Egyptian Arabic and is fluent in German and Dutch. She has twice resided long term in Egypt and will be joining the archaeological team from The Met on their upcoming excavation at Dahshur!

Debora Heard is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology specializing in Nubian Archaeology at the University of Chicago where she has also extensively studied the ancient Egyptian language and history. Her dissertation research analyzes the inscriptions and iconography of Kushite temples dedicated to the gods Amun and Apedemak in Upper Nubia. She situates her research at the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, Egyptology, and Nubian Studies.

Debora has excavated at the 4th Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan as a member of the Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition. For more than 10 years, she has taught courses, given public lectures, and participated in special programming dedicated to ancient Nubia and Egypt at the Oriental Institute, the Kemetic Institute, Chicago State University and, most recently, the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Her audiences have included grade school children, college students, school teachers, museum docents, and general members of the public seeking information about the ancient world. Debora has also served as an intern with the Egyptian and Nubian Collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and curatorial assistant in the installation of the Robert F. Picken Family Nubian Gallery of the Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago, as well as conducted research at the British Museum, Ashmolean Museum, and the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford. She looks forward to sharing her passion for Egypt and Nubia with the Smithsonian Journeys tours.

Betsy Bryan is the professor emerita of Egyptian art and archaeology at Johns Hopkins University, where she continues to teach and work with the Archaeological Museum. Betsy received her doctorate from Yale University’s Near Eastern Languages and Literatures Department and there established her lifelong interest in Egypt’s 18th dynasty and New Kingdom (ca. 1600–1069 B.C.E.) as she wrote her dissertation on Tutankhamun’s great-grandfather Thutmose IV. She was fortunate to join the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1986 and at the same time serve as co-curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ancient Arts Department for the exhibition “Egypt’s Dazzling Sun: Amenhotep III and his World,” which traveled to the Louvre in Paris. In 2002 she organized an exhibition with the National Gallery of Art, “The Quest for Immortality,” borrowed entirely from Egypt, and it traveled in North America for seven years. 

In the field, Betsy directed the Johns Hopkins excavations at the Temple of the Goddess Mut from 2001 to 2023 and now co-directs a joint project with Liverpool University. Betsy's research there has studied the temple’s architecture and artifacts as well as cult rituals.

Betsy has published and contributed to numerous books in addition to those on Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, and her familiarity with Thebes is deep and long. She has appeared in a number of documentaries and recently in the subscription series “Real Ancient Egypt” by Wondrium (formerly The Great Courses). Betsy has shared her passion for Egypt with the public throughout her career.

Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer received her PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago. She now divides her time between teaching in the Department of Anthropology at SUNY Brockport and being the curator of the Morgan-Manning House, a Victorian dwelling and museum located in western New York. After studying chemical engineering in Lille, France, and completing a master’s in Greek and Latin at the University of Vermont, Rozenn centered her research on the ancient Egyptians’ relationship with their environment—most especially with the animals that shared their lives. She is publishing a book on ancient Egyptian aviculture and poultry husbandry. She has worked as a consultant for the Art Institute of Chicago and the Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago, where she curated the exhibit Between Heaven and Earth: Birds in Ancient Egypt.

Rozenn’s move to the Victorian village of Brockport has motivated her to read the many letters and diaries that European and American travelers of the Victorian era wrote during their journeys through Egypt. She is eager to discover how these privileged members of western society described the people they met, as well as the sites, monuments, and landscapes that have since vanished. Rozenn simply loves sharing her passion for Egypt with fellow travelers and cannot wait to do so with you. Be prepared to admire birds along the way—she will have her binoculars and bird books!

Elizabeth Hart earned her Ph.D in the anthropological archaeology of Egypt from the University of Virginia. Motivated by a passion for world history and the profound diversity of human society, her research focuses on understanding ancient economies, particularly through the analysis of flaked-stone artifacts and settlement sites. She has done fieldwork in Egypt yearly since 2004, working at Abydos, Aswan, Elkab, Giza, Helwan, the Valley of the Kings, and many more. She is currently the head lithic specialist for the University of Vienna / German Archaeological Institute Meret-Neith project, which is exploring the tomb of the first female ruler of Egypt. She has shared Egypt’s cultural heritage by teaching courses on Ancient Egypt at the University of Virginia, as a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by working for the non-profit organization the American Research Center in Egypt, and through talks and publications for both academic and general audiences.

Dr. Brooke Norton is the Dr. Barbara Bell Research Associate for Egyptian Expedition Archives at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She’s also a visiting lecturer at Wellesley College where she teaches courses on museum studies and material culture through the anthropology department. Brooke’s research interests include cultural contact between Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean world, Egyptian-Canaanite influences on temple spaces and ritual practice during the Late Bronze Age, and archaeological archives.

While Brooke has worked at various sites throughout the eastern Mediterranean, including in Egypt, Cyprus, Jordan, Italy, and Greece, she primarily works with the Wadi el-Hudi Expedition. Located in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, Wadi el-Hudi is a series of archaeological sites containing ancient amethyst mines and settlements associated with them. She spent an academic year living and researching in Egypt as fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2023.

Annie Shanley received her PhD in Egyptian Art from Emory University, where her research focused on the role of the god Seth in New Kingdom royal monuments. For several years she taught art history at Emory University and the University of West Georgia. In 2014, Annie joined the staff of the Michael C. Carlos Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, where she specializes in researching the provenance (ownership history) of objects in the museum’s permanent collection. She lectures on ancient Egypt, as well as provenance and the ethics of collecting antiquities to both university classes and the general public across Atlanta. Annie has participated in archaeological field work at the tomb of Parennefer on the Theban West Bank, the Delta site of Mendes, Malkata (the palace site of Amenhotep III) in Thebes, and Tel Megiddo-East in Israel.

Natasha Ayers received her PhD in Egyptian Archaeology from the University of Chicago. She has almost 20 years of experience working on excavations across Egypt, and she is the ceramicist for Middle Kingdom through New Kingdom pottery at Tell Edfu. Natasha is excited to share her insights during the visit to Edfu on our Ancient Egypt and the Nile journey!

Natasha is currently a senior postdoctoral research fellow at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna, where she received a research grant from the Austrian Science Fund for her project “Communities Reassembled – Rethinking Identity in Ancient Egypt.” She is a specialist in the material culture of the second millennium BCE, and her research focuses on using artifacts in combination with anthropological theory to better understand the complexities of identity and community in ancient Egypt.

Previously, Natasha designed and taught adult education courses in the archaeology of Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean at Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (formerly the Oriental Institute), as well as undergraduate courses at the University of Chicago. She has collaborated on publication projects with numerous museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, California.

John Baines received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He was Professor of Egyptology there until his retirement in 2014. He has held visiting appointments in universities and research centers in Egypt, China, Europe, and the USA. John has worked with archaeological field expeditions at Saqqara and Abydos, as well as visiting and studying sites throughout Egypt and northern Sudan, and museum collections wherever he has been able to see them. In Egypt he has lectured on a number of tours.

John’s research has addressed many areas of Egyptology, for periods ranging from later prehistory to Greco-Roman times. His work has a strong comparative focus, and he has developed a particular interest in early China, which offers many parallels to developments in Egypt. Among other books, he is co-author with Jaromir Malek of Cultural Atlas of Ancient Egypt (2nd edition, 2000), and author of Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt (2007) and High Culture and Experience in Ancient Egypt (2013). His current research, which he is presenting in public lectures at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich is on Egyptian biographies. In these studies he uses archaeological, art-historical, and text-based approaches, setting the lives of ancient Egyptians within the landscapes that they developed and inhabited.

John is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Philosophical Society and of the German Archaeological Institute. He has served on national and international bodies for research in archaeology, and he continues to be a member of the editorial boards of journals and book series.

Clare Fitzgerald is a curator, teacher, and researcher whose interest in the intersection of people and material culture drives her professional work. She received her Ph.D. in Egyptian Art from Emory University and held fellowships at the American Research Center in Egypt, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She curated the cross-cultural permanent installation of the ancient Mediterranean collection at the Newark Museum of Art and strives to represent the cultural diversity and interconnected nature of the ancient past in her work.

As the Lisa and Bernard Selz Director of Exhibitions at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, she mounted five international exhibitions on ancient topics ranging from the construction of the Ishtar Gate at Babylon to Pompeiian frescoes to the ancient inspiration of the early 20th-century dance company, Ballets Russes.

Clare is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Syracuse University where she teaches art of the ancient Mediterranean to both undergraduates and graduate students. Her Egyptological research focuses on representing elite identity in tomb painting and the afterlives of Egyptian art in museum collections.

Janet Duncan Jones, Professor Emerita of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Bucknell University, is an archaeologist with over 40 years‘ experience in the field. She has participated in excavation projects in Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, and Jordan. Her experience as a glassblower out of college ignited a career long research interest in preindustrial technologies and the lives of early craft workers. While living in villages in the Middle East she became interested in the impacts of preindustrial technologies on the ancient environment and the evolution of cultural landscapes. Her publications include studies of the ancient glass from sites in Turkey and Jordan, and synthetic considerations of the landscape of ancient ruins and of the messages and impacts of ancient mega-engineering projects. Recently she has focused her work on the impact of the Moors in southern Spain on urbanism, architecture, technology, and intellectual history.

Janet has lived in Turkey and Greece, and has traveled widely with an eye toward the messages that landscapes send us about the values and concerns of past peoples. She holds degrees from the College of William and Mary and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she also acquired a devotion to ACC basketball. She lives in the mountains of central Pennsylvania with her geographer husband and hounds descended from those she originally imported from the Euphrates Valley in southeastern Turkey. 

Dr. Robert Stephan is a classical archaeologist, award-winning educator, and veteran of Mediterranean fieldwork whose passion lies in making the ancient world come alive for modern travelers. With a PhD in classics from Stanford University and a BA in classical archaeology from the University of Michigan, Rob blends deep academic expertise with an engaging and down-to-earth teaching style.

He has excavated and surveyed ancient sites across Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Armenia, and Britain, and currently co-directs the Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS), a long-term archaeological project focused on ancient Greek coastal communities. In his role as associate dean of the University of Arizona's Honors College, he helps shape innovative learning experiences that stretch beyond the classroom—including virtual reality reconstructions of ancient cities and video game explorations of cultural heritage.

Rob's archaeological research has been presented and published in journals throughout the world, while his dynamic teaching has earned him national recognition. Most recently he was presented the 2025 Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award from the Archaeological Institute of America and the 2024 Sherrill Creative Teaching Award from the University of Arizona. He specializes in connecting the past to the present, and his lectures invite travelers to not just learn about ancient history, but to experience it through stories, artifacts, monuments, and ethical questions that still matter today.

Equally at home on a mountaintop ruin or in a Roman amphitheater, Rob brings humor, energy, and curiosity to every journey. When he’s not on site or in the classroom, you might find him hiking desert trails, cheering on Michigan football, or hunting down the best nachos in Tucson.

Dr. Meredith Brand is an archaeologist and Egyptologist who teaches classes on ancient Egypt and cultural heritage in the humanities and writing program at The American University in Cairo. Meredith studies pottery and material culture and her research focuses on everyday people in ancient Egypt. She is a co-director of the Wadi el-Hudi Expedition, which surveys and excavates ancient amethyst mines and mining settlements in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, and she has published on the daily life of miners and the administration of mining there. Meredith is regularly featured on programs about ancient Egypt for channels such as National Geographic, Discovery, BBC, and The History Channel. She is a long-time resident of Cairo and enjoys living in Egypt.

Rita Freed received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M. A. and Ph. D. in Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She was Associate Professor of Art at the University of Memphis and founding Director of the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology before coming to the MFA, Boston, to head the Department of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art, a position she now holds as Emerita. She also teaches Egyptian and Nubian Art at Wellesley College and to underserved at risk high school students through the Seymour Institute.

Freed has excavated in Egypt at numerous sites from the Delta to Karnak as well as in Israel and Cyprus. The exhibitions she has curated and co-curated include Egypt’s Golden Age, A Divine Tour of Ancient Egypt, Ramesses the Great, Pharaohs of the Sun, The Secrets of Tomb 10A and Ancient Nubia Now. She has led tours to Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Tunisia, and Syria

Freed is currently a Non-resident Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University. Her book, Ancient Nubian Art: A History, was just published by the Getty. Her next project is co-editing The Image of the Black in Nubia with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 

Ashley Arico is associate curator of Ancient Egyptian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Studies with a focus in Ancient Egyptian art and archaeology from Johns Hopkins University, where her research examined Egyptian statues as evidence for interactions between Egypt and the Levant in ancient times. For several years, Ashley participated in excavations at the temple of the lioness-headed goddess Mut in Luxor, Egypt. She previously held positions at the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. At the Art Institute, Ashley co-authored Ancient Egyptian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (an open-access collection catalogue) and curated a new gallery dedicated to the arts of ancient Egypt. Her interests include tracing how Egyptian artifacts have moved and been interpreted over time, from ancient contexts to the modern museum environment.  

Erik Gustafson is an architectural historian of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Islamic world, whose interests span from the ancient world into the early modern period. He has lived in Italy, France, and Egypt, and has traveled extensively in northern Europe, Iberia, and the eastern Mediterranean. Erik’s academic work addresses how specific sites were historically understood in light of broad intellectual and visual traditions. His current book project, Building Saint Francis, considers how the Franciscan order used architecture to shape and channel the legacy of their founder in the centuries after his death. While completing his PhD on the Franciscan architecture of Tuscany at New York University, he spent several years living in Florence and Rome. Erik has taught a variety of courses on art and architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Fordham University, Washington & Lee University, and George Mason University. He has published on Italian, Spanish, and French medieval architecture as well as Mamluk architecture in Cairo, and is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

Iman is a landscape archaeologist, field researcher, and cultural surveyor with more than 15 years of experience in North Africa, the broader Mediterranean, and Southeast Asia. In her earlier career she focused on settlement archaeology and religious landscapes, working on projects in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. As her research led her to investigate the movement of ideology and material culture across vast distances, she turned her focus to the prehistoric Sahara in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, studying rock inscriptions and landscape configuration.

More recently, her archaeological work has incorporated coastal landscapes including the Canary and Madeira islands, where she has explored connections to the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa that date back 10,000 years.

Now based at the University of California, Los Angeles, Iman continues to follow her passion for the spectacular landscapes of the prehistoric world, working at sites ranging from the early neolithic to contemporary periods. Her research has been shared widely in international conferences. Iman takes great pleasure in demystifying archaeology, sharing her unique insights from the field, and shedding light on connections between cultures of the deep past.

Emily Teeter received her PhD in Egyptology from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Her areas of specialization are the religion, social history, and the material culture of ancient Egypt. After recently retiring after a long career in the Oriental Institute Museum, she consults for museums and Egyptology projects throughout the world. Over the last decades, she has developed and led tours to Egypt and many other areas of the Middle East.

Emily has written a wide variety of popular and scholarly articles and published many books, including Baked Clay Figurines and Votive Beds from Medinet Habu; The Presentation of Maat: Ritual and Legitimacy in Ancient Egypt; Ancient Egypt: Treasures from the Collection of the Oriental Institute; Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt, and Egypt and the Egyptians (which has appeared in Arabic and Turkish editions). She has curated many permanent and temporary exhibits of Egyptian artifacts in major museums in the United States. Dr. Teeter has conducted fieldwork in Alexandria, Giza, and Luxor, and she has appeared on many television programs about Egypt. Emily also has a deep interest in the later periods of Egyptian history and culture.

She is the past President of the American Research Center in Egypt, and she continues to serve on their board. She is a Research Associate of the Polish Centre for Mediterranean Studies, an Associate of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and she sits on the editorial boards of several prominent academic journals. 

Daniel Warne is a Ph.D. candidate in Egyptology at the University of Memphis.  The focus of his current research is the ritual function and classification of a largely royal iconographical motif dating to the New Kingdom.  He has studied, worked, and excavated in Egypt for nearly two decades.  He has worked with Egyptian collections at major museums in Egypt, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is currently an illustrator and digital epigrapher with the Theban Tomb 16 Project at Dra abu al-Naga.  His recent research projects include the scientific analysis of a Ptolemaic mummy, the study of the coffin of Ankhefenmut (an Egyptian priest of the 21st Dynasty, Bab el-Gasus cache), Egyptian Revival sphinxes, and Egyptian collections in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York.

Daniel Warne is a distinguished and passionate educator, earning him the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016.  He has taught numerous courses and seminars in archaeology, Egyptology, and cultural anthropology.  He enjoys travel and has led educational trips, taught overseas, and coordinated several study-abroad programs for university students.  He looks forward to being part of your tour through Egypt.

Vincent Oeters is the acquisitions editor for archaeology and material cultures of ancient civilizations at the international academic publisher De Gruyter Brill. He studied Egyptology, archaeology, and Arabic at Leiden University in the Netherlands and is working on his PhD dissertation on the history of Belgian Egyptology—particularly during the first half of the 20th century—at KU Leuven and Ghent University in Belgium.

Vincent has extensive fieldwork experience in Egypt at sites including Saqqara, Gebelein, and Abydos. From 2017 to 2025, he was chairman of the Friends of Saqqara foundation, a Dutch non-profit organization that provided financial support for archaeological research, documentation, and preservation at the Saqqara necropolis in Egypt. He has published about a Ramesside grave uncovered at Saqqara during a joint expedition by the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and Leiden University in 2009.

From an early age, Vincent regularly visited the Egyptian collection in Leiden and began to learn to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. He now teaches others how to read them and leads tours to Egypt. He has been travelling to Egypt for 20 years and remains fascinated by its ancient and modern cultures. He looks forward to sharing his passion for Egypt with Smithsonian travelers.