Professor Christina Riggs

Chair in the History of Visual Culture, Department of History, Durham University
BA, MA, DPhil, FSA
Quondam Fellow since 2020

I am a historian of archaeology, photography, and ancient Egyptian art. I am interested in how different people, at different times, have imagined, studied, and represented the culture we know as ‘ancient Egypt’. Most recently, I have been working on the photographic archive from the 1920s excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb – and the impact those photographs had both at the time and up to the present day. I am currently extending this research to other photographic archives and collections, for two reasons: first, to explore the history of colonial-era archaeology in Egypt, and second, to investigate the ways in which the dissemination of images and objects shaped ideas about ancient Egyptian art.