Kate Liszka
Kate Liszka completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, with a specialization in Egyptology and Egyptian Archaeology. Before coming to Princeton, she taught at Loyola and Roosevelt Universities in Chicago, and for ten years, was a lecturer with the International Classroom at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. At Princeton, she has taught courses on Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology, as well as a class on ethnicity in antiquity. She has also been the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fund for Faculty Innovation for the Princeton Art Museum, The David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project, and The University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Society Sciences at Princeton, as well as the William Penn Scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania. Also at Princeton, she has conducted a study of the scarab amulets in the Princeton University Art Museum with the help of her class on Ancient Egyptian Archaeology. Liszka’s scholarship grapples with the question of how the Ancient Egyptian state incorporated different types of Nubians into their bureaucracy. Three major projects have developed from this question. She is currently working on a monograph about ancient Nubian people -- the Medjay -- to examine how their relationship with the state changed from pastoral nomads to policemen over a half millennium. She is also beginning a second research project that examines the identity of Pangrave archaeological culture, a group of Nubians who may have worked as mercenaries for the Egyptians. As the director of an archaeological project at the site of Wadi el-Hudi in Egypt, she will conduct a study of this ancient amethyst mining area that reflects both Egyptian and Nubian traditions. Wadi el-Hudi also allows Liszka to examine chronological differences of urbanism, mining, and cross-cultural interactions by comparing areas of the Middle Kingdom (c. 1800 BCE) to the same activities in the Greco-Roman Period.