Sir Charles Nicholson Lecture

'Ancient Egypt' has become an iconic museum culture, one that has come to stand for the museum and for the idea of 'antiquity' itself. 

Associate Professor Alice Stevenson will trace some of the histories of material excavated in Egypt and scattered around the world, examining the many different motivations for collecting Egypt between 1822 and 2022, including in Australia, Canada, Ghana, Japan, and the UK.

Stevenson will consider material from the 1820s when hieroglyphs were first substantially deciphered, through to the 1920s when the world became enamoured with the boy king Tutankhamun, and to the present day with the legacies this leaves us in the 21st century.

Alice Stevenson is an Associate Professor of Museum Studies at UCL, Institute of Archaeology in London. She has held previous posts as Curator of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, as well as Researcher in World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. 

Stevenson specialised in the archaeology of Predynastic Egypt, before turning to research on museum collections. Her recent publications include Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums (UCL Press, 2019), The Oxford Handbook of Museum Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2022), and Egyptian Archaeology and the Twenty-First-Century Museum (Cambridge University Press, 2022). 

Header image: The British School of Archaeology in Egypt’s temporary exhibition of finds from Hawara, 1911. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL.