Professor Christina Riggs | |
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Born | Ohio, United States |
Nationality | British |
Title | Professor of the History of Visual Culture, Department of History, Durham University |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Academic work | |
Discipline | History |
Sub-discipline |
Christina Riggs is a British-American historian, academic, and former museum curator. She specializes in the history of archaeology, history of photography, and ancient Egyptian art, and her recent work has concentrated on the history, politics, and contemporary legacy of the 1922 discovery of Tutankahmun's tomb. Since 2019, she has been Professor of the History of Visual Culture at Durham University. [1] She is also a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. [2] The author of several academic books, Riggs also writes on ancient Egyptian themes for a wider audience. [3] Her most recent books include Ancient Egyptian Magic: A Hands-On Guide and Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century.
Born in Ohio, United States, Riggs was an undergraduate at Brown University from 1989 to 1993. [4] Having majored in archaeology, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1993. [5] She then studied ancient Mediterranean archaeology and art at the University of California, Berkeley, completing her Master of Arts (MA) degree in 1995. [6] After further studies in art history at Harvard University, she moved to England to join the University of Oxford as a doctoral student in Oriental Studies (Egyptology), under the supervision of John Baines and Helen Whitehouse. [5] At Oxford, she was a member of Somerville College and The Queen's College. [4] She completed her Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 2001, with a thesis on funerary art in Roman Egypt. [7]
From 2000 to 2003, Riggs was the Barns and Griffith Research Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford. [4] She then joined the Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester, where she was curator of its Egyptian collection from 2004 to 2006; this led to her book Unwrapping Ancient Egypt. [4] [5] From 2006 to 2007, she was museum education development officer in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. [4]
In 2007, Riggs was appointed a lecturer (assistant professor) in art history at the University of East Anglia (UEA). She was promoted to senior lecturer in 2013, and reader (associate professor) in 2015. In 2018, she was appointed Professor of the History of Art and Archaeology. [7] In 2019, she was elected to the chair in the History of Visual Culture in the Department of History, Durham University, a post previously held by Professor Ludmila Jordanova.
Riggs has held posts at All Souls College, Oxford, where in 2012, she delivered the Evans-Pritchard Lectures, in a series entitled "Unwrapping Ancient Egypt: The Shroud, the Secret, and the Sacred". [8] She was a visiting fellow in 2015, and was elected a Two-Year Fellow in 2018. [4] She has held research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Leverhulme Trust, and the British Academy.
With support from the British Academy and in collaboration with the Griffith Institute, Oxford University, Riggs curated an exhibition called Photographing Tutankhamun, shown at The Collection, Lincoln in 2017-18 and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, in 2018. [9]
Riggs was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA) on 5 March 2009. [10]
Riggs' monograph Unwrapping Ancient Egypt was named a runner-up in the 2015 BKFS prize for books in Middle Eastern Studies, [11] and long-listed for the Textile Society of America's R. L. Shep Ethnic Textiles award. [6]
Tutankhamun, Tutankhamon or Tutankhamen, also known as Tutankhaten, was the antepenultimate pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt. His death marked the cessation of the dynasty's royal line.
The tomb of Tutankhamun, also known by its tomb number, KV62, is the burial place of Tutankhamun, a pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings. The tomb consists of four chambers and an entrance staircase and corridor. It is smaller and less extensively decorated than other Egyptian royal tombs of its time, and it probably originated as a tomb for a non-royal individual that was adapted for Tutankhamun's use after his premature death. Like other pharaohs, Tutankhamun was buried with a wide variety of funerary objects and personal possessions, such as coffins, furniture, clothing and jewelry, though in the unusually limited space these goods had to be densely packed. Robbers entered the tomb twice in the years immediately following the burial, but Tutankhamun's mummy and most of the burial goods remained intact. The tomb's low position, dug into the floor of the valley, allowed its entrance to be hidden by debris deposited by flooding and tomb construction. Thus, unlike other tombs in the valley, it was not stripped of its valuables during the Third Intermediate Period.
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John Robert Baines, is a retired British Egyptologist and academic. From 1976 to 2013, he was Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford and a fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford.
Harry Burton was an English archaeological photographer, best known for his photographs of excavations in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. Today, he is sometimes referred to as an Egyptologist, since he worked for the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for around 25 years, from 1915 until his death. His most famous photographs are the estimated 3,400 or more images that he took documenting Howard Carter's excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb from 1922 to 1932.
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Thomas Alexander "Sandy" Heslop,, publishing as T. A. Heslop, is a British academic who specialises in the art and architecture of medieval England. He is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia (UEA). He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge for the 1997/1998 academic year.
Andrew Henry Robert Martindale (1932–1995) was Professor of Visual Art at the University of East Anglia at the time of his sudden death, aged just 62. One of the pioneers in the teaching of art history as an academic discipline and a founding member of the Association of Art Historians, he was also a highly respected medieval scholar specialising in the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods with a number of publications to his name. His 1972 book, The Rise of the Artist, is much vaunted, often cited, and has been described as 'a brilliant study of the hierarchies within the medieval patronage system'.
Anne Haour is an anthropologically trained archaeologist, academic and Africanist scholar. She is Professor in the Arts and Archaeology of Africa at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. In July 2021 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the social sciences, humanities and arts.
John Mack FBA FSA is a British social anthropologist and art historian specialising in African arts and cultures. He is an academic and former museum curator.
The tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 1922 by excavators led by the Egyptologist Howard Carter, more than 3,300 years after his death and burial. Whereas the tombs of most pharaohs were plundered by graverobbers in ancient times, Tutankhamun's tomb was hidden by debris for most of its existence and therefore not extensively robbed. It thus became the first known largely intact royal burial from ancient Egypt. To date, the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb is widely considered one of the most famous archaeological discoveries of all time.