Staff profile

I am a historian of photography, visual art, and museum and heritage practices. My research considers how photography developed in tandem with industrialization, colonial and imperial expansion (especially in North Africa and the Middle East), and ideas of heritage preservation. I view photographic archives and museum collections not as dead legacies of these pasts, but as living expressions of them which, as historians, we have a responsibility to analyze, evaluate, and confront.

My previous research focused on how different people, at different times and places, have represented the culture we know as 'ancient Egypt'. My work on the history of the Tutankhamun excavation has helped challenge conventional narratives of the discovery by drawing attention to the political contexts of archaeology, photography, and museum displays. My most recent book, Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century (Atlantic Books 2021; Public Affairs 2022) traced the different trajectories taken by the tomb, its 'treasures', and its archive, from the 1920s to the present day. I have also published the first academic study of the excavation's photographic archive, in a book called Photographing Tutankhamun (Bloomsbury 2019).

My current research considers the role of historic photographs in contemporary culture, from digital colourization, to museum and heritage displays, to public art and local history. I am working with Heba Abd el-Gawad to develop a 'counterarchive' of archaeology at Luxor, Egypt, and I am developing a new project on photographic history, the visual arts, and heritage practices in coal mining – including the Durham Coalfield in the northeast of England.

More broadly, I am interested in how photography informs historical methods and how photographs function as social and material objects. Approaches from anthropology, museum studies, and the history of science have helped shape my interdisciplinary work. Trained as an archaeologist and Egyptologist, I began my career working on the visual culture of Roman Egypt and curating museum collections of Egyptian antiquities. Before joining the Department of History at Durham University, I spent twelve years in the Department of Art History and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.

My research has been funded by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am a former Fellow and Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University. In 2012, I delivered the Evans-Pritchard Lectures at All Souls College, which were published as Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (Bloomsbury 2014) – first runner-up in the BKFS Book Prize for Middle Eastern Studies in 2015.

Research Supervision

I welcome inquiries from potential postgraduate research students interested in the history of photography, museums, and visual culture.

• History of photography
• History of museums, collecting, and display
• Archaeology, colonialism, and empire

• Visual and Material Culture

Authored book

• Riggs, Christina (2020). Ancient Egyptian Magic: A Hands-On Guide. Thames and Hudson.
• Riggs, Christina (2018). Photographing Tutankhamun: Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and the Archive. Routledge.
• Riggs, Christina (2017). Tutankhamun: The Original Photographs. The Gower Press.
• Riggs, Christina (2017). Egypt. Reaktion Books; University of Chicago Press.
• Riggs, Christina (2014). Unwrapping Ancient Egypt. Bloomsbury.
• Riggs, Christina (2014). Ancient Egyptian Art and Architecture: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
• Riggs, Christina (2006). The Beautiful Burial: Art, Identity, and Funerary Religion in Roman Egypt. Oxford University Press.

Chapter in book

• Riggs, Christina (2020). Archaeology and photography. In The Handbook of Photography Studies. Pasternak, Gil Bloomsbury.
• Riggs, Christina (2020). Photographing Tutankhamun: Photo­Objects and the archival afterlives of colonial archaeology. In Photo­Objects: On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives in the Humanities and Sciences. Bärnighausen, Julia, Caraffa, Costanza, Klamm, Stefanie, Schneider, Franke & Wodtke, Petra Max Planck Research Library. 12: 291-308.
• Riggs, Christina (2018). Loose bodies: Reserve collections, curatorial reservations, and the ancient Egyptian dead. In Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt. Brusius, Mirjam & Singh, Kavita Routledge. 253-62.
• Riggs, Christina (2015). Egypt. In The Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture. Friedland, Elise A., Sobocinski, Melanie Grunow & Gazda, Elaine K. Oxford University Press. 552-68.
• Riggs, Christina (2015). Discussing knowledge in the making. In Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures. Carruthers, William Routledge. 129-38.
• Riggs, Christina (2013). Greco-Roman Egypt. In World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: A Characterization. Hicks, Dan & Stevenson, Alice Archaeopress. 115-21.
• Riggs, Christina (2013). Mourning women and decorum in ancient Egyptian art. In Decorum and Experience: Essays in Ancient Culture for John Baines. Frood, Elizabeth & McDonald, Angela Peeters. 156-62.
• Riggs, Christina (2012). Portraits, prestige, piety: Images of women in Roman Egypt. In A Companion to Women in the Ancient World. James, Sharon L. & Dillon, Sheila Blackwell. 423-36.
• Riggs, Christina (2010). Ancient Egypt in the museum: Concepts and constructions. In A Companion to Ancient Egypt, 2 vols. Lloyd, Alan B. Blackwell. 2: 1129-53.
• Riggs, Christina (2010). Tradition and innovation in the burial practices of Roman Egypt. In Tradition and Transformation: Egypt under Roman Rule. Lembke, Katja, Minas-Nerpel, Martina & Pfeiffer, Stefan Brill. 343-56.
• Riggs, Christina (2008). Gilding the lily: Shrouds, sculpture, and the representation of women in Ptolemaic and early Roman Egypt. In Egypt and Beyond: Essays Presented to Leonard H. Lesko. Thompson, Steven E. & Manuelian, Peter D. Brown University. 285-304.

Edited book

• Riggs, Christina (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt. Oxford University Press.

Journal Article

• Riggs, Christina (2021). Reborn-Digital Tutankhamun: Howard Carter and an Egyptian Archaeologist, Name Unknown. Photography and Culture 14(3): 395-399.
• Riggs, Christina (2017). Nuns and guns: Thoughts on heritage, histories, and Egyptology. Review of Middle East Studies 51(2): 221.
• Riggs, Christina (2017). In the shadows: The study of ancient Egyptian art. Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 112(4-5).
• Riggs, Christina (2017). Shouldering the past: Photography, archaeology, and collective effort at the tomb of Tutankhamun. History of Science 55(3): 336-363.
• Riggs, Christina (2017). The body in the box: Archiving the Egyptian mummy. Archival Science 17(2): 125.
• Riggs, Christina (2017). Objects in the photographic archive: Between the field and the museum in Egyptian archaeology. Museum History Journal 10(2): 140.
• Riggs, Christina (2016). Photography and antiquity in the archive, or how Howard Carter moved the road to the Valley of the Kings. History of Photography 40(3): 267-282.
• Riggs, Christina (2016). Beautiful burials, beautiful skulls: The aesthetics of the Egyptian mummy. The British Journal of Aesthetics 56(3): 247.
• Riggs, Christina (2016). An autopsic art: Drawings of ‘Dr Granville's mummy’ in the Royal Society archives. Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 70(2): 107.
• Riggs, Christina (2013). Colonial visions: Egyptian antiquities and contested histories in the Cairo Museum. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1(1): 65.
• Riggs, Christina (2013). A Roman Period child's mummy in the Saffron Walden Museum. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 99: 265-70.
• Riggs, Christina & Hardwick, Tom (2010). The king as a falcon: A 'lost' statue of Thutmose III rediscovered and reunited. Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts Kairo 66: 107-20.
• Riggs, Christina (2009). Lions, pylons, and feet: A small-scale linen shroud in the Bolton Museum and Art Gallery. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 95: 249-54.
• Riggs, Christina (2006). Archaism and artistic sources in Roman Egypt: The coffins of the Soter family and the temple of Deir el-Medina. Bulletin de l'Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale 106: 315-32.
• Riggs, Christina & Depauw, Mark (2003). 'Soternalia' from Deir el-­Bahri, including two coffin lids with Demotic inscriptions. Revue d’Égyptologie 53: 75-90.
• Riggs, Christina & Stadler, M.A. (2003). A Roman shroud and its Demotic inscriptions in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 40: 69-87.
• Riggs, Christina (2002). Facing the dead: Recent research on the funerary art of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. American Journal of Archaeology 106(1): 85-101.
• Baines, John & Riggs, Christina (2002). Archaism and kingship: A late royal statue and its Early Dynastic model. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 87: 103-18.
• Riggs, Christina (2000). Roman Period mummy masks from Deir el-­Bahri. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 86: 121-44.

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Riggs, Christina (2012). Ethnicity.
• Riggs, Christina (2010). The body.
• Riggs, Christina (2010). Funerary rituals (Ptolemaic and Roman).