Biography
I received my qualifications from the University of Oxford. After a first degree in Egyptology and Assyriology (BA, 2017), I developed a specialization in approaches to Egyptian and Western visual cultures (MSt, 2018) and began integrating Egyptian material with work in social anthropology (DPhil, 2022). My thesis argued that the iconography of ancient Egyptian deities was partly motivated by the relative power and reality of different figural forms.
Prior to joining the VIEWS project at Cambridge, I was a Research Assistant in the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies and the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography at Oxford, and a sub-editor for the Online Egyptological Bibliography. I also taught undergraduate and graduate students across a range of subjects in Egyptology: language and texts (Egyptian and Akkadian); history and culture; gender and sexuality; art, architecture and archaeology.
Research
- Anthropological approaches to pre-modern societies
- Ancient Egyptian and Classic Maya written and visual cultures
- Materiality, multimodality, sensory experience
My current book project considers how the ontology of images may impact Egyptian and Maya hieroglyphic sign forms and inventories, as well as inscription design. If graphics are understood as active beings in the world, writing is then a powerful resource for interrelating human and non-human persons who traverse, view, and create inscribed spaces. I compare how these potentials were navigated in Egyptian and Maya contexts, and examine the implications of those practices for classifying the world’s writing systems by visual criteria.
Another strand of my research deals with the social dimensions of religious knowledge in ancient Egypt, particularly the transmission of visual imagery. I concentrate on issues of format, materiality, and display.
Publications
Peer-reviewed articles
forthcoming. Graphic worlds in the Book of Two Ways, in: S. Quirke, R. Lucarelli, and H. Rashwan (eds), Rethinking the visual aesthetics of ancient Egyptian writing. Oxford: Archaeopress. [c. 8,000 words]
forthcoming. Geographies of knowledge: on serpent limbs and loose ends, in: E. Panaite (ed.), Meeting the Other: transfers and interactions around the Nile valley. Polish Publications in Mediterranean Archaeology. Leuven: Peeters. [c. 6,000 words]
2023. A predynastic Egyptian fish–antelope composite figure. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology OnlineFirst. DOI: 10.1177/03075133231172791
2022. Patterns and practices of sign-form variation: selected examples of the qjs logogram from the Fifth to Nineteenth Dynasties. Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 149 (2): 213–227. DOI: 10.1515/zaes-2021-0001
2021. Emblematic representation on ancient Egyptian apotropaic wands. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 36 (2): 119–141. DOI: 10.17863/CAM.86209
Edited volume
Ballesteros Petrella, B., D. Giordani, J. Miller, J. Parkhouse, and F. Pischedda (eds) in preparation. Writing orality: cross-cultural perspectives beyond the Great Divide. [Special volume of the journal Manuscript and Text Cultures. Open-access publication expected 2023.]
Exhibition catalogue
Gill, A.-K. and J. Miller 2019. Catalogue of The Queen’s College collection on display in the Peet Library. <https://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/library-and-your-studies/special-collections/>
