Victoria Almansa-Villatoro
Victoria Almansa-Villatoro is Assistant Professor of Egyptology. Her main research interests include ancient Egyptian language and writing in context, social relationships and interaction, and the intersection between religious and official structures of knowledge and discourse. Prior to coming to Yale, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2022–2025).
She is currently working on a monograph focused on the use of politeness in Old Kingdom letters (2400–2200 BCE). This book applies (im)politeness theory and discourse analysis to investigate how ancient Egyptians, including pharaohs, harnessed the power of language and rhetoric to persuade. In addition to demonstrating how linguistic and communication theory can shed new light on ancient texts, this work questions the assumed prevalence of hierarchy, inequality, and social distance in ancient Egyptian interactions by shifting the focus to peer interconnectedness and reciprocal care.
Almansa-Villatoro’s future projects seek new evidence to reconstruct the ancient Egyptian social relationships and religious beliefs through a fresh approach to the sources—one that considers how indirectness, ambiguity, humor, hieroglyphic semiosis, and other communicative strategies convey meaning. She has a secondary interest in multilingualism and dialect variation as a way into the language politics of ancient states. She has co-edited three volumes, including Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic: Rethinking the Origins (Penn State University Press, 2023) and authored more than 25 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on topics ranging from literacy to Egyptian understandings of meteoritic materials. Her research has been funded by the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) and the Stiftungsfonds für Postgraduates der Ägyptologie. She is Assistant Editor of the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections.
Among her ongoing projects are the publication of a large, completely untranslated collection of 3rd millennium BCE papyrus fragments from the Brooklyn Museum, and collaboration with the AERA archaeological mission in Egypt to study and interpret newly uncovered pharaonic seal impressions from the pyramid complexes of Giza.
She completed her PhD at Brown University in 2022 where she taught courses on the ancient Egyptian language and culture. Her teaching includes ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and texts, a comparative course on crime and evil in the pre-modern world, and other aspects of the pharaonic culture and history.