Rita Lucarelli

Rita Lucarelli is an Associate Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She studied at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” Italy, where she received her MA degree in Classical Languages and Egyptology. She holds her Ph.D. from Leiden University, the Netherlands.  Her Ph.D. thesis was published in 2006 as The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen: Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion in the 10th Century BC. Until 2014, she was a Research Scholar on the Book of the Dead Project at the University of Bonn, Germany and lecturer at the same department. She has been a Visiting Research Scholar at the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies of Columbia University and at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) of NYU. At UC Berkeley, Rita Lucarelli is also a Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and Fellow of the Digital Humanities. She is presently working at a project aiming at realizing 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins of the Hearst Museum; the magical spells decorating these objects are taken as case-study for investigating the materiality of the text in relation to ancient Egyptian funerary literature. Rita Lucarelli’s main research interests are magic, demonology and funerary religion in ancient Egypt; she is currently completing a monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt and she is one of the coordinators of the Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project: http://www.demonthings.com.