This is a narrative guide to my research and publications designed to help readers understand my work and for me to help shape my own future research. To set it all in context, it’s good to know that I started out as an archaeologist, thinking that I was going to do a PhD in archaeology: I was interested in Egyptian perceptions of archaeology, and how they related to understandings of ancient Egypt (or not). I’d spent a couple of years in Cairo by that point and knew Arabic well enough to do something quite interesting. But things didn’t really work out that way, at least in any straightforward sense.
 
I did try to go down that route, though. In 2008, I started an MA in Research Methods for Archaeology at UCL where I spent a year writing a PhD proposal (working with David Wengrow and David Jeffreys). That changed into a comparative project about what happened to archaeology in Egypt both after the country’s nominal independence in the 1920s and then on into the 1950s, the arrival of the Free Officers, and beyond: the idea was to trace archaeology across Egypt’s changing political contexts, and in particular to understand whether or how colonial practices lived on.
 
The focus was the (remarkably persistent) career of the British archaeologist Walter Bryan Emery, with comparative parts about the Egyptian archaeologist Zaki Saad (who Emery worked with in Nubia and at the site of Saqqara) and the German Egyptologist Rudolf Anthes (who very briefly worked near Saqqara in the 1950s). I did a lot of research, most of which never saw the light of day, and some of which I still think I could rework into an article. I wrote a brief online piece for Antiquity, available here.
 
By the time I’d finished the MA, however, it was clear that I wasn’t simply doing an archaeological project anymore. Through the vagaries of the PhD application process, I got AHRC funding at Cambridge to do a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science, starting in 2010. I worked with Jim Secord and Eleanor Robson, and what they taught me helped me to re-think everything (although in retrospect probably not nearly enough, and much of what I learnt there is still sinking in even now). Reading David Bloor’s Knowledge and Social Imagery was the particular eye-opener as I remember it: the Strong Programme and the analytical notion of ‘symmetry’ helped me to find a way through, even though I’m not convinced my dissertation was particularly ‘symmetrical’.
 
During this time, I spent a year (2011–12) in Cairo affiliated to the Department of History at AUC (with thanks to Khaled Fahmy), doing research in the Egyptian National Archive, among other places. From 2012–14, with Allegra Fryxell and Julie Lawrence, I also co-organised a seminar series (‘Field Notes’) on the histories of archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), which was incredibly helpful for understanding the wider contexts in which my own research sat.
 
The resulting PhD dissertation considered Egyptian archaeology much as I said I would: from the 1920s until the end of the 1950s. It is probably disjointed, as dissertations often are. Much of the first chapter is about legislative developments in Egypt from the 1920s onwards (based on the archives I had access to in Cairo). The rest of the dissertation is a micro-history of the mid-1950s excavations led by Rudolf Anthes on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in collaboration with the Egyptian Department of Antiquities at the site of Mit Rahina (ancient Memphis), just south of Cairo. Heavily contextualising the excavation within Arabic press material, I was interested in how the work was embedded in the overlapping contexts of the developing Egyptian revolution, the Cold War, and modernisation/development.
 
I published several articles deriving from the dissertation (one based on the first chapter, one a summary of the excavation portion of the dissertation coupled  with a discussion of multilateralism, one a chapter about the Mit Rahina dig house and the social relations embedded within it, and one an in-depth exploration into what being in the field at Mit Rahina actually meant in the context of changing archaeological practices and geopolitics). I also still have mountains of Arabic press and other material I never really did anything with and sometimes think about returning to: not least to try and think further about how ancient Egypt sat within Egyptian ‘public culture’ (recently I became particularly interested in Egyptian radio in this context, alongside sound recordings made of archaeological work).
 
Around the time I submitted my PhD (either slightly before or after; it’s all a bit of a blur) I also submitted the manuscript for an edited volume called Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures. The volume, published in 2014 with Routledge, was based on a conference organised with UCL, SOAS, and the Egypt Exploration Society in 2010 (with Stephen Quirke, Ayman el-Desouky, and Chris Naunton). As far as I can tell, it seems to have had an impact.
 
The year after the PhD (2014–15) I was lucky enough to hold a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence, working with Stéphane Van Damme as my mentor. I wish I hadn’t had to spend most of the time writing job and grant applications, but that’s academia (and things are much worse now). We did manage to organise a workshop on the history of science and the history of archaeology, which resulted in this introduction to a special issue of History of Science.
 
There followed (2016–18) a Gerda Henkel Stiftung Research Scholarship and a stint as a visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute London. That funding allowed me to do the research for my book, Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology (Cornell, 2022; published in paperback in 2026). The book—a History Today book of the year in 2022—traces the genealogies, histories, and afterlives of UNESCO’s International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, which took place in Egypt and Sudan from 1960 until 1980 and has long been presented as pivotal to the development of World Heritage. If it was pivotal, I argue that the campaign also created the conditions for colonial archaeological practices to continue in new ways in the era of global decolonisation.

This funding also made possible this related paper about Nubia and archival dispossession published in the International Journal of Islamic Archaeology. During 2016, I also spent three months in Delhi as a fellow at the M S Merian—R Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. That work made possible this article about Indian archaeologists working in Egypt in the 1960s, and also a related chapter in my book.
 
Towards the end of this time, I worked with Rodney Harrison (UCL/AHRC Heritage Priority Area) and Indra Sengupta (German Historical Institute London) to organise a conference on ‘Heritage, Decolonisation, and the Field’. Some of the papers from that conference are published in this special issue of the journal Future Anterior (dated 2019, but published in 2021), alongside a lengthy introduction by me. I wish more people would read it, partly because I think it makes an important point in trying to parse the differences between ‘decolonisation’ as a formal geopolitical process then and ‘decolonisation’ as a process happening in heritage and museums now.
 
My work in Delhi informed my next job: a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2018–22) at the University of East Anglia for a project called ‘Making Global Heritage: Afro-Asianism and the Archaeological Survey of India’ (Christina Riggs was mentor). Eagle-eyed readers will realise that this work has slightly stalled: the Covid-19 pandemic made the travel that the project research was predicated on impossible. That said, during this time I nevertheless edited a short (2021) special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Archaeology called ‘Inequality and Race in the History of Archaeology’ that has enjoyed a strong readership (unsurprisingly, given the topic). I also recently published an article in History of Science about the Archaeological Survey of India and development work in Nepal derived from research I did while at UEA. Methodologically, I also think that the questions raised by the project remain vital: how did archaeological—and, increasingly, heritage—knowledge move across a changing post-war world?; why did it move?; why didn’t it?
 
Those questions inform the two book projects I’m currently developing at the University of Essex. The first is about the extent to which ‘heritage’ has been a product of the ‘Global South’, tracing that development from the post-war period into the 1990s and the growth of structural adjustment. I think this is a complex issue: heritage has clearly been a Eurocentric phenomenon, entangled with Euro-American institutions and the end(s) of European colonialism. Heritage has also been, however, a phenomenon embedded across the world and one in which forums for exchange have existed for Global South countries, not least at UNESCO. I want my book to parse the complexities of this history.
 
My second book project addresses the question of archaeology’s mobility post-World War II in an attempt to produce a ‘new history’ of the discipline in a period of immense global change. I’m interested in understanding what archaeological knowledge now ‘counted’, how—and if—archaeologists managed to talk to each other across shifting professional and political boundaries, and how developments in science and technology changed the work and questions of archaeology itself etc. My feeling is that this history is a lot ‘bumpier’ than received opinion states.