I hold BA(Honours) and PhD degrees in Ancient History from Macquarie University (2000–2008). I moved to Berlin to conduct postdoctoral research in Egyptology and linguistics, first as a Fellow of the Excellence Cluster 'Topoi: The Formation and Transformation of Space and Knowledge in Ancient Civilizations' (2009–2010) and then as a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2010–2012). I held the position of Junior Professor for Egyptology at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany from 2012–2019, after which I became a Research Fellow at the University of Vienna (2019–2020). In April 2020 I moved back to Sydney to take up a position at Macquarie University, where I am now Senior Lecturer.

I am passionate about exploring how ancient texts and languages help us access ancient ways of thinking and feeling. My current research focuses on word meaning in the Ancient Egyptian language, manuscript studies and object studies, as well as studies of ancient medicine and body ontologies. My approches range from linguistics and cognitive science to literary analysis and anthropology and I am committed to utilising and expanding the tools of digital corpus analysis for ancient languages. My case studies mainly focus on texts and materials from the Ramesside Period of Egyptian history, in the Late Bronze Age.

I teach and have taught units on Egyptian language (Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian) and script (hieroglyphs and hieratic), Egyptian archaeology, history and culture, literature, language history, medicine, magic and religion. I also teach history theory and historiography. I have developed a number of projects with and for students, including digital corpus analysis, developing digital content for an Egyptian text database and annotating metaphors in Egyptian texts.

I supervise topics in the following areas:

* Ancient Egyptian language and texts, including linguistic topics (lexical semantics, discourse analysis) and manuscript studies

* Cognitive approaches to ancient sources (metaphor, metonymy, emotion studies, semiotics, embodied and distributed cognition)

* Ancient Egyptian literature and literary theory

* Ancient Egyptian medicine, magic and religion

* Ancient Egyptian history and historiography