Event: WEDS TALKS: On the Trail of Reisner: Archival Research at the MFA

ABSTRACT: Three UCLA Nubian Studies doctoral students and I traveled to Boston in August to research Kushite royal iconography as evidenced in the extensive Nubian collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. These objects were shipped from Sudan to the MFA in the early twentieth century under a system called partage in which excavators took half of the finds back to their home institutions. George Andrew Reisner was a complicated figure. We will unpack Reisner's legacy while describing some fascinating Nubian antiquities in the Boston collection.

BIOS: Wanda Harris is a PhD student in Art History at UCLA whose research bridges seventeenth-century colonial Puerto Rican portraiture and ancient art of the seventh century BCE, with a focus on the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Nubia.

Malkia Okech is a second year graduate student pursuing a doctoral degree in Near Eastern Languages & Cultures in the subdiscipline of Egyptology and Nubiology. They are interested in Nubian art, religion, archaeology, and cultural memory.

Charles Rhodes is a 4th year PhD student in Near Eastern Languages & Cultures.. His subdisciplines are Egyptology and Nubian Studies focusing on Kushite Kingship ideology and religion.

Solange Ashby is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Cultures. Dr. Ashby’s expertise in sacred ancient languages including Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Coptic, Ethiopic, Biblical Greek and Biblical Hebrew underpins her research into the history of religious transformation in Northeast Africa and the Middle East.