Biographies of Person and Place. The Tomb Complex of Weni the Elder at Abydos, Vols. I & II

Dr. Janet Richards is Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Middle East Studies and Curator for Dynastic Egypt at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD in anthropology and Oriental studies, 1992), Northwestern University (BA in anthropology and French, 1981), l’École du Louvre, and l’Université de Paris-IV, she specializes in ancient Nile Valley archaeology and history, with emphasis on conceptual landscapes and verbal and spatial rhetorics of response to political crisis, biography and local saint cults, archaeology in popular culture, and the past as cultural heritage in the past and present. At the Kelsey Museum, she has curated or co-curated several exhibitions, most recently Discovery! Excavating the Ancient World. Her publications include the co-edited volume Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States (Cambridge U. Press 2000), Society and Death in Ancient Egypt: Mortuary Landscapes of the Middle Kingdom (Cambridge 2005), and numerous articles and exhibition catalogues on Egyptian archaeology and art. She is currently Director of the University of Michigan’s Abydos Middle Cemetery Project in southern Egypt, a large-scale investigation of a late third–early second millennium BC mortuary and votive landscape.

Dr. Janet Richards, archaeologist and Director of the University of Michigan Abydos Middle Cemetery Project since 1995, is the lead researcher for this Shelby White and Leon Levy Program project. She participated in all archaeological, survey, and study campaigns for the excavations in the Middle Cemetery as well as in extensive research on museum collections holding archaeological material from the Middle Cemetery excavated in the 19^th and early 20^thcenturies. Dr. Richards will be working with a multi-national team of co-authors (Ayman Damarany, Suzanne L. Davis, Salima Ikram, Christian Knoblauch, Peter Lacovara, Franck Monnier, Mohamed Naguib Reda, Caroline Roberts, Hamada Sadek, Heather Tunmore, Korri Turner, and Mohamed Abuel Yazid); coordinating the processes of digitization of drawings, photographs and other records from the Michigan work at Abydos, as well as overseeing and editing the authors’ input to the narrative of the two-volume book project, and working with team members to craft the synopses in Arabic for each volume.