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Critical focus on the processes of creation of the object of knowledge as legitimated by, and legitimating, two overlapping contested terrains, archaeology and Egyptology.
Working from a base within a museum 'of Egyptian archaeology' the initial focus is on the Flinders Petrie typological corpora, projected and then published 1880s-1920s, using the archive as the involuntary memory of the disciplines.
A broader framework sets this in the long durations of gift-giving, landscape-living (including travel) within the Nile Valley in Egypt and out across Africa, into Asia and to Europe. Taking the time-frame 1515 to 1956, historical research is to target and problematise the canonical phases/events of occupation/liberation and colonisation/decolonisation in Egypt as an archaeological landscape in production.
International funding will be sought to allow a team of postdoctoral researchers to probe diagnostic developments along key binary spectra in this history of material circulation: Egyptian/Ottoman Turkish; metropolitan/subaltern; North/South European/Euroamerican; disciplinary/universal.