Thais Rocha
I am Assistant Professor in Ancient History at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), where I direct the Brazilian Egyptology Centre (NEB) and the Ancient Near East Laboratory (LAOP). I am a permanent member of the UFMG Graduate Programme in History and a collaborating professor in the Graduate Programme in Social History at the University of São Paulo (USP). I am also a Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, and, since 2026, a member of the HASAÉ team and associate researcher (chercheuse associée) at ArScAn (UMR 7041, CNRS). I hold a DPhil in Egyptology from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford (St Benet’s Hall). From 2020 to 2024 I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at USP, funded by FAPESP. In 2023 I was a Research Visitor at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO), Leiden University, and at the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. I co-direct the project “Being Egyptian: Dwelling Practice in the Nile Valley and Beyond”, with the Egypt Exploration Society, and direct Mudraya, a Franco-Brazilian working group on Egypt in the Persian period, in collaboration with the CNRS, UERJ and USP.
My research investigates how people in ancient Egypt conceived, organised and experienced domestic space. My DPhil (Oxford, 2020) examined the Workmen’s Village at Amarna through an anthropologically oriented approach, asking how privacy and social relations were negotiated within houses and the wider community. I now extend this work chronologically and geographically, from New Kingdom settlements to Egyptian communities living abroad and to Egypt under Persian rule. My approach draws on household archaeology, material culture studies, sensory archaeology and ethnography, and is attentive to gender as a structuring element of domestic life. I am particularly interested in how the domestic sphere was socially constructed through everyday practices, objects and spaces, and in developing methods to study houses whose material remains are often fragmentary. My FAPESP-funded postdoctoral project, “Domestic Space in Ancient Egypt: Sensorial Experience and Negotiations in Foreign Lands” (USP, 2020-2024), explored the social practices and sensory dimensions of houses, including how Egyptian identity was lived and maintained among foreigners. I worked with the Amarna Project from 2017 to 2024 and co-direct “Being Egyptian: Dwelling Practice in the Nile Valley and Beyond” with Linda Hulin (University of Oxford). The project is based at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and at UFMG, in partnership with the Egypt Exploration Society and with the participation of the University of São Paulo. I also direct Mudraya, a Franco-Brazilian working group on Egypt in the Persian period. Alongside this work, I research the history of Egyptology, with a focus on gender and on the development of the field in Brazil.
Bio
My path to Egyptology began at the University of São Paulo (USP), where I studied History (BA, 2001), with a focus on Ancient History and Archaeology. I then completed an MPhil in the Department of Oriental Languages at USP, with a dissertation on gender relations in Ptolemaic Egypt (332-30 BCE) based on Greek and Demotic letters. During those years I was a visiting scholar at the Oriental Institute in Chicago (2009) and spent research periods in the United Kingdom (2011, 2013), where I began working with colleagues at the British Museum, University College London, the University of Oxford and the Egypt Exploration Society. These experiences led me to Oxford for my DPhil.In 2020 I returned to Brazil, as part of the commitment attached to my CNPq doctoral scholarship. What began as a requirement became one of the most rewarding phases of my career: it allowed me to work closely with Brazilian colleagues and to help build the field at home through teaching, supervising students, writing and public engagement. Since 2024 I have continued this work as a professor at UFMG. Keeping my ties with Oxford and with international projects, I see my role as building bridges between two very different academic realities, and I hope to keep strengthening these connections.Teaching has always been at the heart of what I do. Before my academic career, I worked for many years as a history teacher in Brazilian schools and as a museum educator at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), and I contributed to teaching materials for several Brazilian publishers. At Oxford, I taught Egyptian art and history and the archaeology of Amarna, an experience I now bring to my students at UFMG.
Current Projects
Being Egyptian. Dwelling Practice in the Nile Valley and Beyond.
A EES affiliated project
What did it mean to be Egyptian when you lived far from the Nile Valley, in a fortress town in Nubia, a trading settlement in the Delta or a community in the Levant? Being Egyptian is a research project that explores this question through the place where identity is lived most closely: the home.
Houses tell us how people cooked, slept, worked, worshipped and shared space with family, neighbours and strangers. By studying their layout, objects and the sensory world they created (light, sound, smells, textures), we can see how ancient Egyptians adapted familiar ways of living to new places and how they mixed with other cultures, or kept themselves apart from them.
I co-direct the project with Linda Hulin (School of Archaeology, University of Oxford), a long-standing colleague with whom I share a Research Fellowship at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. Being Egyptian is based jointly at Harris Manchester College and at UFMG, where I teach, and is affiliated with the Egypt Exploration Society (EES), with the participation of colleagues and students from the University of São Paulo (USP).
Being Egyptian began in 2021 with a series of public discussions hosted by the EES. These led to two research strands on how domestic environments shaped daily experience:
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Nubia and the Delta: a comparison of settlements at the edges of Egypt’s domain, led by Thais Rocha da Silva with FAPESP funding at USP (2020-2024);
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Egypt and the Levant: a study of how material culture and domestic space affected the way people perceived and lived in their surroundings, led by Linda Hulin.
Watch the highlights of our seminar series here.
Recent Talks
Selection (in English)
Ancient Egypt in Brazil: From the Imperial Age to a Global Egyptology? (guest speaker)
Oriental Societies 2.0: Governance of Scholarship, Imperial Agendas, Societal Engagement and Entanglement, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, November, 2025
This lecture traces the history of ancient Egypt in Brazil, from the collections and interests of the Brazilian Empire in the nineteenth century to the recent growth of academic Egyptology. It examines how imperial agendas, museums and popular culture shaped Brazilian views of Egypt, and asks whether the field can now contribute to a more global and plural Egyptology.
The Material Culture of Domestic Space: What Do We Do with Gender? (guest speaker)
International Conference Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt: Roles, Norms and Transgressions, Sorbonne Université / Collège de France, Paris, France, 2025.
Houses are often read through assumptions about women’s and men’s roles inherited from early Egyptology. This paper discusses the methodological limits and possibilities of identifying gender in the material culture of Egyptian domestic space, drawing on New Kingdom settlements, and argues for approaches that look at practices and relations rather than fixed gendered areas.
Amarna Workmen's Village: Food Cooperation or Individualisation? (guest speaker)
BrIAS Workshop Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food History in Egypt: Past and Present. Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies (BrIAS), Université Libre de Bruxelles.
The Amarna Workmen’s Village is a special purpose settlement that housed the workforce engaged in the royal construction projects. The settlement was occupied for approximately 20 years and its inhabitants likely had to finish their homes after the Egyptian administration laid out the building area. Archaeological evidence from the village shows that people engaged in many modifications within their houses, adding or removing walls and building installations for food production. This evidence has been investigated mainly from an economic perspective. Delwen Samuel’s work about bread making in the village emphasized a process of individualisation in which the inhabitants were operating independently of one another. She argued that the presence of the state and the dependence on state provisions led the local population to be less cooperative. In this paper, I explore a different venue, arguing instead that the village privileged cooperation for food production. Domestic maintenance activities should not be regarded simply to an economic, utilitarian perspective. Rather, daily life in the Workmen’s Village was subject to specific type of domestic experience that were not solely based on individual houses, but the village itself.
Poverty at Home? Community Life and Social Status in New Kingdom Egypt (guest speaker)
WHO WAS POOR IN PHARAONIC EGYPT AND ITS NEAR EASTERN NEIGHBOURHOOD SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND VISIBILITY ACCORDING TO TEXTS, PICTURES AND ARCHAEOLOGY.
University of Vienna, 6-8th September, 2024
The investigation of domestic space in ancient Egypt privileged larger houses with scholars focusing on space use and artefact assemblages to determine social activities and status. Many analyses have been influenced by the assumption that the material culture equals social status of the inhabitants, especially regarding to house size. This is particularly problematic when we investigate special purpose settlements, like the Workmen’s Village in Amarna, with smaller houses in a cluttered space. The settlement housed the workforce engaged with royal building construction and was built and maintained by the Egyptian state. The existence of
communal areas spread out of the enclosure wall may have given a different idea about what "house" was for these communities. In this
presentation, I explore anthropologically-oriented methodologies, like the study of gated communities and sensorial archaeology to understand "village life". Furthermore, I will discuss what small houses within communities can off er
to shed light on defining the social status and community life in ancient
Egypt.
Fieldwork
Bead Workshop M50 14-16. Amarna Project
Autumn 2017, 2018.
Excavation and recording of the domestic complex M50 14-16 under the supervision of Dr Anna Hodgkinson. Post-excavation duties included the registration of finds and the digitisation of records (documentation, cataloguing, and photography of the faience and glass beads, digitalisation of some plans using GIS).
North Tombs Cemetery. Amarna Project
Spring, 2017.
Excavation and recording of non-elite burials under the supervision of Dr. Anna Stevens.
Read More.
East Devon Pebblebeds Project
2011
Excavations and recordings of prehistoric cairns under the supervision of Prof. Christopher Tilley.
Teaching
Courses and Tutorials
Guest Lecturer for the Module 03-AEG-2107/3112 Anatomie der Ägyptischen Kultur(en) anhand ausgewählter Beispiele I.
Wintersemester 2022/23, Universität Leipzig, Ägyptologisches Institut.
Course title: “Sex and Erotic in Ancient Egypt”. Teaching with Dr. Ann-Katrin Gill.
Ancient History
Material Culture and ancient Egypt: recent debates
Introduction to Archaeology and Material Culture Studies
Teaching Practice I: Ancient History
Since 2024, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Domestic Space and material culture: trends and debates (FLH5640, Graduate course), History Department, University of São Paulo.
September-October (2022)
To present the main debates regarding the definitions of domestic space and its methodological issues, within Material Culture Studies and other fields, like archeology, history of the senses, gender studies, and theory of practice. The chronological and geographical outline of this discipline is broad in order to highlight the theoretical-methodological debate in the field. Through different case studies, that vary both chronologically and geographically, the discipline offers students the possibility to explore different types of evidence together with a critical reading of the academic scholarship on the topic.
Archaeology (FLH0630). History Department, University of São Paulo
2021-2022
The aim of the course is to present Archeology and Material Culture Studies from a historical perspective, discussing the main theoretical and methodological debates and their interdisciplinary developments, especially in History, Archeology and Anthropology.
Gender issues: feminine and masculine in ancient Egypt
March 15, 22, 29, April 5, 2021
This course aims to reflect on the notions of feminine and masculine in ancient Egypt, debating the use of gender as a concept for the study of ancient societies. We examine the representations of men and women in Egyptian art, as well as in the funerary context, texts and monuments in different periods of Egyptian history, also highlighting how this information was interpreted by Egyptology.
Ancient Egypt. Archaeology and Art History
2020
I explore how ancient Egyptian artefacts were appropriated by the West and how ancient Egypt was adapted throughout the 20th century by History and Art History according to specific ideas of civilisation and art. The course is hosted by Instituto Mundo Antigo.
Amarna
2019
I've been teaching about the history and the archaeology of Amarna using an interdisciplinary approach. My focus is on material culture and archaeology of settlements. I taught about Amarna at Oxford in tutorials, lectures and museum classes for undergraduate and graduate students.
Art and architecture
2019
I gave tutorials about ancient Egyptian art covering topics such as daily life, religion and history. I encouraged students to engage critically with the scholarship and material culture through a systematic observation and description of the artefacts.
Workshops
2020
I conducted two workshops in September, hosted by the Universidade Federal do Paraná: 'Gender Studies and Material Culture' and 'An introduction to the history of urbanism in Ancient Egypt'.
Introduction to Middle Egyptian
September - November, 2020
I share this short introduction to Middle Egyptian with Dr Ronaldo Gurgel Pereira. The course is hosted by the University Federal of Santa Catarina. This is the first course about Egyptian language in Brazil made online, reaching a wide audience of students and lectures from Brazil and Argentina.
Selected Publications
Research and Articles (English and Spanish)
Brazilian Egyptology: reassessing colonialism and exploring limits
2019
in Hana Navratilova; Thomas L. Gertzen; Aidan Dodson; Andrew Bednarski. (eds).
Towards a History of Egyptology. Proceedings of the Egyptological Section of the 8th ESHS Conference in London, 2018. Münster: Zaphon, 2019, 127–146
Reassessing models in gender and domestic space in New Kingdom Workmen's Villages
2018
In Stephanie Lynn Budin, Megan Cifarelli, Agnès Garcia-Ventura & Adelina Millet Albà (eds). Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the Second Workshop held at the Universitat de Barcelona, February 1-3, 2017. Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, p. 299–312.
On the media
ETC...
Tae Kwon Do
I have been practising taekwondo since 2008, and it has been part of my life ever since. During my years in Oxford, it was what kept me focused, healthy and balanced while I worked on my doctorate. For three years, I was part of the University team that competed against Cambridge in the Varsity Match, one of the oldest sporting rivalries in the world. Fighting alongside the Oxford squad, I was proud to help bring home victories and to be awarded two Oxford Blues, the University’s highest sporting honour.
Taekwondo taught me discipline, resilience and the value of teamwork, lessons I carry into my research and teaching. It also reminds me that learning does not happen only through books, but through the body, practice and the people we share it with.
St Benet's Hall
I was part of the first group of women studying in the college. I participated in the creation of the Graduate Society at St Benet’s Hall and acted as its president for two years. We established the Graduate Study Room at Norham Gardens. The building was the house of Prof. Griffith, who created the department of Egyptology at Oxford, which certainly added a special meaning for me. I enjoyed helping the college to establish a productive and supportive working space for grads and to organised the first series of Graduate Seminars.
THE GEEK SIDE
I have always been a science fiction fan. Watching films and series and reading about other universes helps me think about the human experience: how we live, how we relate to technology, to time and to those who are different from us. Perhaps that is why science fiction has also become a research companion.
The ancient world and science fiction have more in common than it may seem. Both invite us to imagine other worlds, other bodies and other ways of living, and both reveal as much about those who imagine them as about what is imagined. It is no coincidence that antiquity appears so often in science fiction: galactic empires modelled on Rome, heroes who revisit Greek myths, lost civilisations such as Atlantis and, above all, ancient Egypt, often portrayed as the mysterious origin of humanity or as a society so extraordinary that it could only have come from the stars.
In my work, I bring science fiction together with anthropology, history and archaeology in two ways. It is an object of study: I examine how these narratives appropriate the ancient past and reproduce, or challenge, origin myths, ideas of progress and colonial perspectives. It is also a tool for thinking: concepts born in fiction, such as the cyborg, help us reflect on bodies, technologies and identities in ancient societies, and question the categories through which we look at the past.
This combination is also a way of bringing research closer to the public. Science fiction sparks curiosity, raises questions and reminds us that studying antiquity is, at heart, an exercise in rigorous imagination: imagining what it might have been like to live in a different way.
FIRST WOMAN TO RECEIVE A DPHIL AT ST BENET'S HALL
I was the first woman to receive a doctoral degree at a Benetian institution at the University of Oxford since its foundation in the 13th century.
Get in Touch
Harris Manchester College. Mansfield Rd, Oxford OX1 3TD, United Kingdom
