Sara Orel

Sara E. Orel (Chapter Council Representative) is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classics of the University of Kansas. She has been a member of ARCE since 1987, and a member of the Missouri chapter since 2020. Sara retired as Professor of Art History at Truman State University (Missouri), where she also taught Museum Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies. As a retiree, she has now returned full time to Egyptology. Sara earned her A.B. at Bryn Mawr College in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Egyptian Archaeology, where she specialized in Middle Kingdom pottery and burial customs. Her published articles and papers include discussions of objects and texts from the Old Kingdom through the Late Roman period in Egypt as well as studies and mentoring of undergraduate research in the arts and humanities. She edited Death and Taxes in the Ancient Near East and co-edited the Council on Undergraduate Research publication How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates. Her current research focus is completing a report of 1990s survey work at the Gebel el-Haridi, a cliff site near Sohag that includes material from the Old Kingdom to the Coptic Period.