Christelle Alvarez's interests focus primarily on ancient Egyptian philology, epigraphy, beliefs and practices, and the socio-historical context of the 3rd millennium BCE. She is a member of the Mission archéologique franco-suisse de Saqqâra (MafS) since 2011 and directs the fieldwork at the pyramid of king Qakare Ibi (8th Dynasty c.2150–2134 BCE) in South Saqqara. Her research is interdisciplinary, combining archaeological data and philological analysis supported by literary theories and epigraphy, while considering the socio-historical contexts in order to better comprehend and situate the world’s oldest surviving corpus of religious texts known as the Pyramid Texts.
Her current work includes the publication of the hieroglyphic ritual texts inscribed on the walls of the burial chamber of king Ibi based on the find of hundreds of new fragments and the reassessment of the architectural structure of the pyramid itself. She also works on a monograph about the Memphite tradition of inscribing pyramids and the development of mortuary literature at the end of the Late Old Kingdom.
She studied Egyptology and Coptic at the University of Geneva (BA and MA) and holds a MSt and DPhil from the University of Oxford. Before coming to Brown, she worked with the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Episteme in motion. Transfer of knowledge from the Ancient World to the Early Modern Period’ at the Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). She is also an active member of the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures at the University of Oxford.
