Postdoctoral Fellow in Archaeology and the Ancient World (2014-2016)

Miriam is an Egyptian archaeologist and especially interested in the spatial organization of domestic architecture in the pharaonic period and its social implications. She is currently working on aspects of the formation of identity at the household level, in particular through ancestor cults.

She received her MA from the University of Heidelberg and finished her PhD at the University of Vienna where she worked on the material from the Austrian Archaeological Institute’s excavations in Tell el-Dab'a in the eastern Nile delta. On the basis of the documentation and finds of a residential area she explored the field of household archaeology and its benefits for Egyptian archaeology. Within her MA and PhD studies Miriam has worked on settlements from different time periods, from core and periphery of the Egyptian empire.

Prior to her appointment at the Joukowsky Institute, Miriam has been the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago’s first two-year postdoctoral fellow. Her interest in the field formed the idea for suggesting an interdisciplinary symposium on recent developments in household studies with the aim of bringing the archaeological, textual and scientific record together that was held at the Oriental Institute in March 2013. She is the editor of the conference proceedings “Household Studies in Complex Societies. (Micro) Archaeological and Textual Approaches” and is currently working on the publication of her dissertation. Miriam has participated in excavations in Egypt, Israel, Austria and Germany.