Miriam Müller is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies.

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Miriam Müller is a university lecturer in Egyptian archaeology, art and material culture at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies and especially interested in the spatial organization of domestic architecture in the pharaonic period and its social implications. She is working on aspects of the formation of identity at the household level, in particular through ancestor cults, and with a focus on the borderlands of the Egyptian empire. Here she explores the mixing and mingling of different cultures on the periphery of the Egyptian state.

Miriam received her PhD from the University of Vienna where she worked on the material from the Austrian Archaeological Institute’s excavations in Tell el-Dab'a in the Eastern Nile Delta. On the basis of the documentation and finds of a residential area she explored the field of household archaeology and its benefits for Egyptian archaeology. Miriam is the editor of the conference proceedings “Household Studies in Complex Societies. (Micro) Archaeological and Textual Approaches”. Her research on a neighborhood of the ancient city of Avaris was published as a volume of the Tell el-Dab^ca excavation series.

Within her research Miriam has worked on settlements from different time periods, from core and periphery of the Egyptian empire. She has participated in excavations in Egypt, Sudan, Israel, Austria and Germany and is the co-director of the Material Culture field school at Saqqara (together with Sarah Schrader/Archaeology).

Prior to her appointment at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Miriam was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Adjacent to her role as lecturer she is also currently holding the post of director of the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO).

Publications