Dr. Kathryn Howley is an archaeologist and art historian of ancient Egypt and Sudan, currently serving as Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art at NYU. Dr. Howley is particularly interested in questions of materiality and intercultural interaction. She is fascinated not only by how and why material culture crosses borders, but also by the active role that material culture plays in negotiating intercultural contact. Her current research uses theoretical frameworks drawn from anthropology and art history in addition to more traditional Egyptological methodologies in order to reconstruct the roles that Egyptian material culture played in Nubian society in the first millennium BC, and investigate how foreign material culture was used to negotiate indigenous social systems in Nubia.

Dr. Howley is currently running a fieldwork project at the mid-first millennium BC Amun Temple of Taharqa at Sanam in Sudan. The project investigates how Egyptian material culture was used at Sanam to reinforce Nubian systems of economy and status, and, following discovery of a monumental mud brick building from the early first millennium BCE, the early stages of the Napatan state which grew to rule over Egypt.  It has been supported by grants from the Levy White Foundation, the Egypt Exploration Society and the Explorers’ Club. 

Dr. Howley is convinced that Ancient Egyptian evidence should be integrated into wider debates in the humanities and social sciences. Her co-edited volume, Egyptology and Anthropology (published open access by the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections), brings together papers from a 2017 symposium on the future of the engagement between the two fields. In this spirit, Dr. Howley teaches on various themes from archaeological theory at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, as well as on Egyptological topics. She encourages a self-reflexive and critical stance towards the constitution of our “knowledge” of the ancient past. Vital to this is reckoning with the legacy of Egyptology’s racist and colonial past, and considering the impact of this disciplinary history on our modern understandings of ancient Egypt. 

Dr. Howley's interest in material culture has led to extensive work in and with museums, spanning a range of research, curatorial and educational roles. She is particularly interested in object-based teaching methods, as well as examining the influential role that museums have had in shaping both the public conception of ancient Egypt and the academic direction of Egyptology.

Before coming to the NYU Institute of Fine Arts in New York in 2018, Dr. Howley was Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, and taught art history at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of East Anglia in the UK.