Episode 87: The Mummy/The Untold History of Women Egyptologists with Kathleen Sheppard

Historians At The Movies

This week Kate Sheppard drops in to talk about the movie that made everyone bisexual: 1999's The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. We get into why this is such a perfect summer movie and dive deep into the history of archaeology itself. Kate also shares with us the findings from her new book Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, available now. This is an awesome conversation with one of my favorite people in the profession. I hope you like it.

About our guest:
Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. After a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at the American University in Cairo, she arrived at Missouri S&T in the fall of 2011. She teaches mainly survey courses on modern Western Civilizations, which is arguably one of the most important courses students in 21st century America can take. Her main focus is on the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught courses on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science.

Sheppard’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century Egyptology and women in the field. Her first book was a scientific biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain (Lexington, 2013). Murray’s career spanned 70 years and over 40 publications. Sheppard is also the editor of a collection of letters between Caroline Ransom Williams, the first university-trained American Egyptologist, and James Breasted from the University of Chicago (Archaeopress, 2018). Sheppard’s most recent monograph, Tea on the Terrace, is about hotels in Egypt as sites of knowledge creation in Egyptology during the discipline’s “Golden Age,” around 1880 to 1930.