Meet our new NVIC Director: Marleen De Meyer
We are very happy to announce that as of 1 March Marleen De Meyer is our new NVIC Director!
Marleen is an Egyptologist who has been with the institute as Assistant Director already since 2016. She was interviewed for Leiden News about her new appointment and her plans for the institute, you can read about it here.
Bio
Marleen De Meyer has been the Assistant Director for Archaeology and Egyptology at NVIC since 2016 and Interim Director after the unexpected passing of our dear Director Rudolf de Jong last year. In this capacity she has run the annual Cairo Semester for Egyptology students for many years. In 2023 she was the William Kelly Simpson Visiting Professor in Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and also held a guest professorship at the University of Basel in Switzerland in the same year. She co-directs the Dayr al-Barsha Project, an interdisciplinary archaeological research project in Middle Egypt. Her research centres around Egyptian provincial funerary culture and administration from the Old Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom. De Meyer received her PhD in Egyptology at KU Leuven, Belgium, with a dissertation on the late Old Kingdom rock tombs at Dayr al-Barsha. After her PhD, she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Research Foundation Flanders to investigate provincial administration in the 15th and 16th Upper Egyptian nomes. Part of that fellowship she spent as a visiting research scholar at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2010–2011). She was a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven until 2023, where she also taught courses on various aspects of the archaeology and language of ancient Egypt. Prior to her work at Dayr al-Barsha, De Meyer was an epigrapher at the Roman Period temple of Shenhur, north of Luxor (1997–2001).
Recently De Meyer has engaged in several projects on the history of Egyptology. Between 2018–2023 she was a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Pyramids and Progress: Belgian expansionism and the making of Egyptology, 1830–1952” and between 2019–2022 she co-directed the SURA Project at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, focusing on the early 20th century glass plates collection of the Egyptian department that documents the pioneering years of Egyptology in Belgium. In 2020 she started a project together with the CEDAE and Ifao on the archive of the Service des Antiquités égyptiennes (mainly dating from the period between 1890–1930) at the Center of Studies and Documentation of Ancient Egypt (CEDAE) in Cairo. Now she is part of the core research group of the interdisciplinary Arabic Excavation Diaries Project under the direction of Harvard University, which works on a unique collection of 73 Arabic manuscript diaries written by the Egyptian foremen of the Harvard University-Museum of Fine Arts Boston Expedition to Egypt between 1913–1947. This collection for the first time offers the opportunity to study the Egyptian perspective of fieldwork practices in the beginning of the twentieth century.