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Faculty

Elizabeth J. Minor

Elizabeth Minor

Assistant Professor

Research Interests

  • Museum Anthropology
  • Digital Anthropology, UX, Human Computer Interactions
  • Nile Valley Archaeology

Contact Information

Office: Bldg 47, Rm 13-A

Phone: (805) 756-0870

mail: elminor@calpoly.edu

Webpage

 

About Dr. Elizabeth Minor

Dr. Elizabeth Minor is an anthropologist who specializes in the ancient Nile Valley, museums, human-computer interaction, and cultural heritage management. She earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies (now Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures) at the University of California - Berkeley. She holds 20 years of experience working with anthropological museum collections, including the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum, the British Museum, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the Wellesley College Davis Museum. Her digital museum projects focus on connecting diverse audiences with cultural heritage, especially through community collaboration and student-led creative interactive design. Dr. Minor is the Co-Director and PI for a National Science Foundation funded project which uses community-based research practices to better understand cultural resilience under the changing climate of the ancient Middle Nile, through analysis of historical museum collections and ethnography. She also has over 20 years of field archaeology experience, excavating in Egypt (since 2005), Sudan (since 2014), California (since 2002), and Massachusetts (since 2017).

She is excited to return to her home state of California, and to get to explore all the local museums and heritage sites in the area as she develops a Digital California Cultural Heritage project.

 

Education

  • Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies, Egyptian Archaeology, UC Berkeley
  • M.A. in Near Eastern Studies, Egyptian Archaeology, UC Berkeley
  • B.A. in Anthropology, Wellesley College

 

Courses Taught

  • ANT 470/471 Museum Anthropology
  • ANT 470/471 Digital Anthropology
  • ANT 201 Cultural Anthropology

 

Selected Publications

  • Minor, E., K. Oliver, and K. Fleming. 2024. “From Glyphs to Bytes: Ancient Egypt and the Future of Digital Humanities in Museum-based Learning,” in Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice, L. Jimenez, J. Thum, C. Walsh, L. Haney (eds.), Routledge Press.
  • Minor, E. 2024. “Connecting the Pieces: Reassessing Classic Kerma Art through Digital Reconstructions of Collections in Boston and Khartoum,” in the Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference for Nubian Studies, Louvre & Sorbonne, Paris, 10th-15th September 2018. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta. Leuven: Peeters.
  • Minor, E. 2022. “Afterlives of Kerma Religion: Rams, Lions, and Fantastical Winged Animals (Hippopotami and Giraffes) in Classic Kerma and Later Kush Contexts,” in the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections v. 35 (special issue, the Origins and Afterlives of Kush), pp. 141-154.
  • Minor, E. 2022. “Faience Tiles from Deir el-Ballas and Kerma: New evidence of Egyptian-Nubian relations at the foundation of the New Kingdom” in Redmount, C. and D. Kiser-Go (eds.), Gedenkschrift Cathleen Keller, UC Berkeley Publications in Egyptian Archaeology, Lockwood Press, pp. 103-116.
  • Minor, E., P. Favela, M. Morris, G. Oppenheim, and R. Tao. 2022. “Digital Engagement Strategies for Community Based Archaeology: Crowdsourcing Excavation Planning and Gamification to Share Research Results for the Wellesley College Hall Archaeology Project,” in E. Watrall and L. Goldstein (eds.), Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice, University Press Florida, pp. 87-124.
  • Emberling, G. and E. Minor. 2022. “The Kerma State,” in N. Moeller, D.T. Potts and K. Radner (eds.), The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East, Oxford University Press, pp. 101-146.
  • Minor, E., S. Schellinger, C. Sevara, A. E. A. El-Hassan (Sokhari), and S. A. O. Ahmed. 2020. “Laying the Groundwork: 2020 Survey Season Results and Community Outreach Programme at the Kerma Period Settlement Site Es-Selim R4 in the Northern Dongola Reach,” in Sudan & Nubia, Bulletin of the Sudan Archaeological Research Society, London, vol. 24, 100-111.
  • Minor, E. 2018. “One More for the Road: Beer, Sacrifice and Commemoration in Ancient Nubian Burials of the Classic Kerma Period,” in Current Research in Egyptology 2017: proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Symposium: Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” Naples, Italy, 3-6 May 2017. Archaeopress: Oxford, pp. 126-138.
  • Minor, E. 2018. “Decolonizing Reisner: the Case Study of a Classic Kerma Female Burial for Reinterpreting Early Nubian Archaeological Collections through Digital Archival Resources,” in M. Honegger, ed. Nubian Archaeology in the XXIst Century: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference for Nubian Studies, Neuchâtel, 1st-6th September 2014. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 273. Leuven: Peeters, pp. 251-262.
  • Pollalis, C., E. Minor, L. Westendorf, W. Fahnbulleh, I. Virgilio, A. Kun, and O. Shaer. 2018. “Evaluating Learning with Tangible and Virtual Representations of Archaeological Artifacts,” in Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group Computer Human Interactions (ACM SIGCHI): Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interactions. doi>10.1145/3173225.3173260

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