Professor Christina Riggs
Chair in the History of Visual Culture, Department of History, Durham University
BA, MA, DPhil
Quondam Fellow since 2020
I am a historian of photography, visual art, and museum and heritage practices. My research considers how photography developed in tandem with industrialization, colonial and imperial expansion (especially in North Africa and the Middle East), and ideas of heritage preservation. I view photographic archives and museum collections not as dead legacies of these pasts, but as living expressions of them which, as historians, we have a responsibility to analyze, evaluate, and confront.
- Two-Year Fellow, All Souls College (from 2018 to 2020)
- Lecturer (2007-13), then Senior Lecturer (2013-15), then Reader (2015-18) in Art History, then Professor of the History of Art and Archaeology (2018-19), University of East Anglia
- Visiting Fellow (2015) and Evans-Pritchard Lecturer (2012), All Souls College
- Museum Education Development Officer, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (from 2006 to 2007)
- Curator of Egyptology, Manchester Museum, University of Manchester (from 2004 to 2006)
- Barns and Griffith Research Fellow, The Queen’s College, University of Oxford (from 2000 to 2003)
- Postgraduate, University of California, Berkeley; Somerville College and The Queen’s College, University of Oxford (Exchange Scholar, Department of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, 1995-6) (from 1993 to 2001)
- Undergraduate, Brown University (from 1989 to 1993)
- Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2021)
- Photographing Tutankhamun: Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and the Archive (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)
- Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (London, Bloomsbury, 2014)
- Ancient Egyptian Art and Architecture: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
- The Beautiful Burial: Art, Identity, and Funerary Religion in Roman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
- Publications (External Link)
- Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2016).
- British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2015).
- First runner-up, BKFS Prize in Middle Eastern Studies for Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (2015).
- AHRC Research Fellowship (2011).