Émilie Sarrazin
Émilie Sarrazin is an archaeologist and Egyptologist who earned her PhD in Near Eastern Art and Archaeology from the University of Chicago in 2024. Her research interests include settlement archaeology, household religious practices, the First Intermediate Period and its historiography, regional funerary practices during the late 3rd millennium BCE, and the interactions between ancient Egypt and Nubia.
Since 2015, Émilie has worked as a field supervisor and archaeologist for the Tell Edfu Project, led by Prof. Nadine Moeller and Dr. Gregory Marouard at Yale University. As a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Egyptology at Yale, she is now involved with the Tell Edfu Publication Project, focusing on publishing the results of the last two decades of excavation at this ancient provincial capital in Upper Egypt.
In support of her doctoral project, she was a Dissertation Fellow at the Center for the Mediterranean World in 2023–2024. She is currently preparing a monograph for the Publications of The Center for the Mediterranean World series. This book, building on her dissertation, focuses on the analysis of archaeological remains from the site of Mendes in the Eastern Nile Delta. Her work examines the evolution of this provincial capital during the late Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period and addresses common narratives about this transitional period from the perspective of the Nile Delta. The project draws on the unpublished archive of the 1960s–70s Mendes expedition led by the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Between 2017 and 2021, Émilie was also a member of the collaborative and interdisciplinary research project Coping with Changing Climates in Early Antiquity, funded by the Humanities Without Walls consortium. Her research focused on climate change discourses to explain transitional periods in ancient Egyptian history. In addition to teaching at the University of Chicago, she also worked for the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum as a mapmaker and curatorial assistant, and for the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) on projects utilizing GIS for archaeological and heritage purposes.