Luiza Osorio

Luiza Osorio G. Silva is Assistant Professor of Art History, Archaeology, and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. 

As a Research Affiliate at Yale, Luiza is working on her book project, Kings from Below: How Egyptians Navigated Royal Power in the Middle Kingdom (under contract with OUP). The book challenges scholarly and popular narratives of the prominence of Egyptian kingship based on royal sources. Rather than assuming that kings prevailed over ancient Egyptian society, the book proposes that ordinary Egyptians had rich lives that intersected with, but were not simply subject to, royal power. It does this by using textual, archaeological, and iconographic evidence from the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2055–1650 BCE) to explore varied engagements with kingship through monuments, rituals, symbols, labor. The complex ways in which ordinary Egyptians experienced the seemingly sharp division between kings and their subjects reveal the limits of royal power. Examples of these engagements range from the desecration of a pyramid to the invocation of kings in private correspondence by some, but not all, Egyptians. The complexity of relationships between royal and ordinary members of society uncovered in the book is a springboard for thinking about power dynamics, the interface between ideology and practice, and human possibility: not only in civilizations ruled by kings, and not only in the past.

Luiza is currently Co-Director of the Kom Firin Archaeological Project (KFAP), Assistant Director of the Mastaba of Akhmerutnisut Documentation Project (Giza, Egypt) and an archaeologist for the Memphis Kom el-Fakhry Archaeological Project (Memphis, Egypt). She is also a member of the team working on the development of Kiosk, an open-source integrated iPad recording platform and browser-based data for field archaeology (https://sites.brown.edu/kiosk/).