FOA Webinar: Kathleen Sheppard - American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)

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FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS

Women’s Work in Abydos: Margaret Murray, Amice Calverley, and Myrtle Broome

Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on February 5, 2025, at 7:00 pm EST, presented by Dr. Kathleen Sheppard. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

In 1902, Margaret Alice Murray got invited to work in the field—finally. Training with Flinders Petrie for the last eight years, she had taught plenty of students in London, but had never been to Egypt to work herself. She spent only one season at Abydos, working in the Osireion, a special temple that no one had yet fully understood. Two years later, Murray’s publication, The Osireion at Abydos, upended all previous theories about the site. By 1938, Amice Calverley and Myrtle Broome were leaving Abydos, having spent almost a decade copying the art in the Temple of Seti I. Their own publications, The Temple of Sethos I at Abydos, were four volumes of brilliantly painted art from the temple walls in exacting detail. This talk will detail the ways in which the work women did on site at Abydos in the early 20th century impacted our understanding and reception of one of the most important sites in all of ancient Egypt.

Dr. Kathleen Sheppard is Professor in the History and Political Science department at Missouri S&T. Her focus of study is the history of Egyptology. Her most recent book, Women in the Valley of the Kings, tells a history of Egyptology through the perspective of women’s work in the field. Her 2022 book, Tea on the Terrace: Hotels and Egyptologists’ Social Networks, investigates the role of hotels as hubs in the professional and friendship networks of Egyptologists in the late 19th and early 20th century. She received her MA in Egyptian Archaeology from UCL in 2002 and her PhD in History of Science from University of Oklahoma in 2010.