Rita Lucarelli

Rita Lucarelli is an Associate Professor of of Egyptology and Class of 1939 Chair in Undergraduate Education in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture. She is also the Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and a Fellow of the Digital Humanities at UC Berkeley. She is presently working at a project creating 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins, the Book of the Dead in 3D. She is also completing a new monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt entitled Agents of Punishment and Protection: Ancient Egyptian Demonology in the First Millenium BCE. 

Rita Lucarelli teaches, lectures and research Egyptomania and the reception of ancient Egypt in the contemporary world, in particular on the representation of ancient Egypt in Afrofuturism. She also teaches courses of Egyptology and interdisciplinary writing at San Quentin State Prison through the Mount Tamalpais College. 

Professor Lucarelli studied at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” Italy, where she received her MA degree in Classical Languages and Egyptology. She holds her Ph.D. from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her Ph.D. thesis was published as The Book of the Dead of Gatseshen: Ancient Egyptian Funerary Religion in the 10th Century BC. She worked as a Research Scholar and a Lecturer at the Department of Egyptology of Bonn University, where she was part of the team of the Book of the Dead Project.