Overview
I grew up in Singapore and studied at the University of Oxford (DPhil, 2022). My research and teaching center on ancient Egyptian religion and visual culture, with a focus on the second millennium BCE. I often adopt comparative and cross-disciplinary approaches informed by social anthropology and the history of art, for example by engaging with early Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican cultures.
Before joining Cornell as Assistant Professor, I was a Research Associate at the Faculty of Classics and St John’s College in the University of Cambridge (2023–2025), where I contributed to the project Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems. I am preparing a book that explores ancient Egyptian and Classic Maya concepts and experiences surrounding what we call hieroglyphs. What did it mean to write, and what counted as writing, in these cultures? What can writing be and do?
I have published on amuletic imagery, prehistoric art, oral and literary traditions, historical consciousness, as well as conceptualization and discursive forms in Egyptian religion. Other ongoing research examines relationships between texts, images, and materials in spaces such as tombs and coffins. I also build ancient Egypt into large-scale interdisciplinary projects associated with Seshat: Global History Databank, having previously contributed to the Database of Religious History.
Research Focus
- Indigenous concepts of images and bodies
- Materiality, multimodality, sensuous experience
- Comparative approaches to early cultures
Publications
Books
[under contract] "A Palette of Scripts and the Spread of Alphabetic Writing," co-authored with Philippa Steele, Philip Boyes, and Colton Siegmund. Cambridge Elements: Elements of the Mediterranean Iron Age. Cambridge University Press.
[in preparation] "The Written World: Experiences of Hieroglyphs in Ancient Egyptian and Maya Cultures" (working title). Visual Interactions in Early Writing Systems. De Gruyter.
Edited volume
2024. "Writing Orality," co-edited with Bernardo Ballesteros Petrella, Domenico Giordani, James Parkhouse, and Flaminia Pischedda. Special issue of Manuscript and Text Cultures 2 (2).
Articles
[in press, c. 10,000 words] Comparing images, bodies, and ontologies in ancient Egypt and in Egyptology. "In Egyptology in Dialogue: Historical Bodies in Relations of Comparisons and Negotiations," edited by Camilla Di Biase-Dyson, Rune Nyord, Leire Olabarria, and Reinert Skumsnes. Special issue of Interdisciplinary Egyptology.
2025. A bookish burial: kings, scribes, and the Amduat catalog. In "Looking Beyond the Text: New Approaches to Scribal Culture and Practices in Ancient Egypt," 32–64, edited by Margaret Geoga, Aurore Motte, and Judith Jurgens. Harvard Egyptological Studies 27. Leiden: Brill.
2023. A predynastic Egyptian fish–antelope composite figure. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 109 (1–2): 21–29.
2022. Patterns and practices of sign-form variation: selected examples of the qjs logogram from the Fifth to Nineteenth Dynasties. Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 149 (2): 213–227.
2021. Emblematic representation on ancient Egyptian apotropaic wands. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 36 (2): 119–141.
