Symposium 2025 - Speakers Biographies
November 8: 49th SSEA Symposium
Turbulent Times, Hostile Neighbours: Egypt in the Late Period
Mariam F. Ayad is Associate Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo. In 2020–2021 she was a visiting associate professor of Women’s Studies and Near Eastern Religions and a research associate of Harvard Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program. She is the author of God’s Wife, God’s Servant: The God’s Wife of Amun (c. 740–525 BC) (Routledge, 2009), and the editor of Studies in Coptic Culture: Transmission and Interaction (AUC Press, 2016) and Women in Ancient Egypt: Revisiting Power, Agency, and Autonomy (AUC Press, 2022).
Lawrence M. Berman is John F. Cogan, Jr., and Mary L. Cornille Chair, Art of Ancient Egypt, Nubia, and the Near East at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He received his Ph.D. in Egyptology from Yale University. He is a frequent lecturer and is author of numerous books and scholarly articles. His most recent book is Faces of Ancient Egypt: Portraits from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA Publications, 2022). Areas of research include: Middle Kingdom Egyptian art, history, and literature; art of Amenhotep III; the Late Period; portraiture in Egyptian art; history of Egyptology; early Western travellers in Egypt and the Near East; and the display and interpretations of ancient Egypt in museums.
Ken Griffin currently serves as the Curator of the Egypt Centre at Swansea University. He has visited Egypt over 60 times, and since 2010, he has actively participated in archaeological fieldwork in both Egypt and Sudan. He is an epigrapher with the South Asasif Conservation Project (SACP), focusing on reconstructing the funerary texts (Book of the Dead and Ritual of the Hours of the Night) within the tomb of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty official Karakhamun. He is the co-editor of two volumes on Thebes in the First Millennium BC (Cambridge Scholars, 2014; Golden House Publications, 2018).
Rhyne King is a historian of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which stretched from the eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia from 550 to 330 BCE. He published his first book, The House of the Satrap: The Making of the Ancient Persian Empire (University of California Press, 2025). Rhyne received his PhD from the University of Chicago and currently works as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto.
Jean Li is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is a long-time member and an Associate Director of the University of Berkeley el-Hibeh Project. Her research focuses on examinations of gender, theoretical approaches to archaeology, women, gender and identity, and the Third Intermediate Period. She is the author of Women, Gender, and Identity in the Third Intermediate Period: The Theban Case Study (Routledge, 2017). Recent publications include the chapter, "Egypt Before the Saites" in the Oxford History of the Ancient Near East, vol. IV (2023).
Jeremy Pope is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the College of William & Mary. While his early work dealt with Demotic graffiti in Lower Nubia from the Meroitic era, his publications over the past decade have focused instead upon the Napatan era and especially the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty—including a book on its domestic policy The Double Kingdom under Taharqo (Brill, 2014) as well as articles investigating the period’s foreign policy in the Near East and its chronology, social identities, historical archives, non-royal self-presentation, scribal practice, warfare, and culinary traditions. He is also particularly interested in the evolving history of ancient Nubia’s modern interpretation and therefore welcomes questions from the audience about those historiographic dimensions of the lecture topic.
