Matthew A. Sears is a historian of ancient Greece and Rome, specializing in military monuments and commemoration, war and society, and ancient historiography. He publishes widely on Greek and Roman politics, society, and culture, and has bylines in The Washington Post, The Globe & Mail, Maclean’s, and Time Magazine. He holds a PhD in Classics from Cornell University
Dr. Jen Thum is Associate Director of Academic & Campus Partnerships and a Research Curator at the Harvard Art Museums. In these roles she oversees university-level interdisciplinary learning; directs a gallery-teaching training program for graduate students across Harvard; facilitates object-based learning workshops for faculty and students; teaches the museums’ medical humanities programs; and works on research, teaching, and curatorial projects related to her expertise in ancient Egyptian art. Jen holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University and an M.Phil. in Egyptology from the University of Oxford. She is the author/editor of multiple publications at the intersection of Egyptology and museum pedagogy, including Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice and the forthcoming Objects of Inquiry: A Field Guide to Interdisciplinary Learning in Art Museums. Jen also currently serves as the Archaeological Institute of America’s Vice President for Outreach and Education.
Emily Van Alst is an assistant professor at Washington State University in the Department of Anthropology. She received her PhD and MA from Indiana University and her BA in anthropology and archaeology from Yale University.
She is currently conducting a research project entitled Inscriptions of the Elk Nation: Interpreting Rock Art through an Indigenous Lens, where she is working with members of the Hehaka Oyate to reinterpret rock art sites in Wyoming and South Dakota with a particular interest in images related to elk (Cervus canadensis). This project braids together ethnohistory, cultural mapping, visiting circles, and rock art research, with community members driving the research questions and objectives. She employs a diachronic framework that bridges ancestral rock art with contemporary landscapes, ceremonies, and Indigenous ontologies.
Her publications focus on Indigenous women’s relationships to rock art in the northern Great Plains and on reclaiming cultural heritage with, by, and for Indigenous and descendant communities through community-directed archaeological research projects. She is the co-editor of Indigenizing Archaeology: Putting Theory into Practice (University Press of Florida) and the series co-editor for Indigenous Archaeology Methods and Practice in the Americas (University of New Mexico Press).
