Louise O’Brien
Portraits of Hybridity: Understanding Hybrid Cultural Identity in Roman Egypt through the Hawara Mummy Portrait Panels.
Biography
Louise was awarded a 1st class BA(hons) in Egyptology & Classical Studies, and an MA Egyptology with Distinction, both from the University of Liverpool.
Outside of her studies, Louise works in museums and archives, most recently with the Garstang Museum of Archaeology on projects to digitise and catalogue the glass plate negative collection for online publication. She has also worked with the British Museum’s Circulating Artefacts project and has previously worked as a digital museum consultant and communications manager.
Research interests
Louise’s thesis aims to rethink the traditional approach to hybrid culture and material in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Focusing on the Fayum mummy portraits, she has developed a new methodology for the analysis of hybrid visual culture. Bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to the topic – one which has often been confined by disciplinary boundaries – her work treats the portrait panels as artefacts of funerary display rather than solely works of artistic value. She investigates who may have create the panels, who commissioned them, who was depicted, and why, before considering the decisions made about modern display in museums themselves based on our assumptions regarding the original purpose. Such research addresses the long-standing issues of colonial misconceptions made by 19th and 20th century archaeologists regarding the portraits and places the portrait owners at the centre of the research, aiming to understand how individuals living in the Fayum navigated the changing cultural and political landscape.