Liam McNamara

Liam McNamara is Keeper (Senior Curator) of the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum and Associate Professor of Egyptology. He was previosuly the Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator for Ancient Egypt and Sudan and lead curator on the redevelopment of the Ashmolean’s permanent galleries for ancient Egypt and Sudan which opened in November 2011. He also served as Director of the Griffith Institute (the University of Oxford’s research centre for Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies) from 2015–2019. Prior to his appointment at the the Ashmolean in 2010, Liam was a Project Curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum. Liam is Assistant Director of the Ashmolean’s Expeditions to Hierakonpolis and Elkab in Egypt. He has worked as an archaeological illustrator and field archaeologist on excavations at Kom Firin in the western Nile Delta (directed by Neal Spencer) and at Hierakonpolis in southern Egypt (directed by Renée Friedman). He has also worked on an epigraphic survey of sites in northern Sudan with the British Museum (directed by Vivian Davies). His research interests centre on the archaeology and material culture of ancient Egypt and Sudan, with a specilaism in the late Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods (late 4th–early 3rd millennium BC), for which the Ashmolean holds the most significant collections anywhere in the world outside Egypt.