Meet the Board

General inquiries can be sent to ARCEMissouri@gmail.com. To contact chapter board members or learn more about our work, see below:

Stacy Davidson- President 

Email: sdavid22@jccc.edu

Personal Website: https://scribespalette.wordpress.com/

Stacy Davidson is the resident Egyptologist and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS. She established an Egyptology specialization in the Continuing Education Department at JCCC to further her goal of making Egyptology accessible to any who wish to learn. She has also led programming in Ancient Civilizations and Languages for the Summer Youth Program at JCCC. As a member of the Humanities Kansas Speakers Bureau, she brought ancient Egypt to life in underserved communities throughout Kansas as a traveling lecturer. Through the International Studies Department at JCCC, she has co-led student study trips to London, Oxford, and Berlin to examine Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts and collections and highlighted the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures of Andalusía, Spain. Professor Davidson is a member of the International Association of Egyptologists, ASOR, and the Association of Ancient Historians (AAH). Her research interests include: scribal palettes, Egypt/Little Egypt, Illinois, the reception of Egypt, the history of Egyptology, and the pedagogy of Egyptian hieroglyphs/hieratic. Professor Davidson is a 2020-2021 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow, a 2020-2021 JCCC College Scholar, and a 2021 NISOD Excellence Award recipient.

Dr. Julia Troche- Vice President

Email: JuliaTroche@MissouriState.edu 

Personal Website: https://history.missouristate.edu/JuliaTroche.aspx

Dr. Julia Troche, Associate Professor of History at Missouri State University, is an Egyptologist and social historian whose forthcoming monograph focuses on how power structures and mortuary culture intersected in Egypt’s Old through Middle Kingdoms (c. 2700-1800 BCE). She received her BA in History from UCLA and her PhD in Egyptology and Assyriology from Brown University. Dr. Troche is deeply invested in education at all levels and seeks to develop pedagogy that encourages challenging content and skill-driven learning, that is also fun and accessible, such as with video games and utilizing high impact learning strategies. She has had the opportunity to work as excavator, surveyor and epigraphist at Abydos and Luxor, Egypt and at Petra, Jordan. Dr. Troche is on the ARCE Board of Governors.

Rozanne Klinzing- Treasurer

Email: rklinzin@uchicago.edu

Rozanne Klinzing holds an MBA in Finance and Accounting from the University of Chicago and has taken a number of courses in History and Art History at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and Johnson County Community College. Having retired from a career in financial computer systems design, she has developed a fascination for the people who created the masterworks in the Nelson’s Egyptian collection. Rozanne has been a docent at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City in the Egyptian galleries, the most visited in the museum, since 2012. There, she regularly gives talks and tours related to her interest in Egyptian art and developing visual thinking strategies.

Dr. Lisa Saladino Haney- Secretary

Email: lisasal@gmail.com

Dr. Lisa Saladino Haney was born and raised in Kansas City, MO, and currently serves as the Postdoctoral Assistant Curator of Egypt on the Nile at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Her specialty is the archaeology and material culture of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, particularly the reign of Senwosret III. She has served as a lecturer at the Kansas City Art Institute and University of Kansas and has held positions at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Penn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. She received her PhD in Egyptology from the University of Pennsylvania, earned an MA in Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian Studies at NYU, and her BA in Near Eastern and Classical Antiquities from Missouri State University.

Dr. Kathleen Sheppard- Director

Email: sheppardka@mst.edu

Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma. Her teaching focuses mainly on the broad survey of the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught surveys on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science. Her research focuses on 19th and 20th century Egyptology and women in the field. Her first book (2013) was a scientific biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain. Murray’s career spanned 70 years and over 40 publications. She is also the editor of a collection of letters between Caroline Ransom Williams, the first university-trained American Egyptologist, and James Breasted from the University of Chicago (2018). Sheppard is a contributing editor to the online magazine Lady Science, which focuses on issues that women have faced, and continue to encounter, in the sciences. Currently Sheppard is working on a monograph about hotels in Egypt as sites of knowledge creation in Egyptology during the discipline’s “Golden Age,” around 1880 to 1930.

Clara McCafferty Wright- Director

Email: cmw272@cornell.edu

Clara McCafferty Wright is a doctoral student in Classical Archaeology and Art at Cornell University. She recently completed an MPhil degree in Egyptology at the University of Cambridge with a dissertation entitled, “Reconsidering Cleopatra VII: The Lost Narrative of Egypt’s Last Queen.” Prior to her MPhil work, she was a Hanna Holborn Gray Research Fellow and a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, where she double majored in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology & Classical Cultures and Societies with a research focus in Ptolemaic Egypt. During her undergraduate degree, she studied in the Egyptology programs at the University of Pennsylvania and the American University in Cairo and authored a thesis on Cleopatra VII’s political influence on the Isis cult in Italy. In addition, she co-founded the Bryn Mawr College Egyptology Association and established The Bryn Mawr College Magic Lantern Slide Digitization Project. Clara is passionate about diversifying our understanding of the ancient world to one which includes the narratives of disenfranchised members of societies, including women, enslaved people, and the working class. She has a strong interest in using the study of the past to empower people today by making information on the ancient world accessible to rural and underprivileged communities.

Dr. Anne Austin- Director

Email: austinan@umsl.edu

Dr. Anne Austin received her B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University, and she earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in the Archaeology program at UCLA. She joined the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2017 after completing a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in the History Department. Her research combines the fields of osteology and Egyptology in order to document medicine and disease in the past. Specifically, she uses data from ancient Egyptian human remains and daily life texts to reconstruct ancient Egyptian health care networks and identify the diseases and illnesses people experienced in the past. While working in Egypt, Anne discovered the only known ancient Egyptian tattoos on a mummy with over 30 different tattoos. Anne’s next research project will focus on the practice of tattooing in ancient Egypt and its potential connections to gender, religion, and medicine. In addition to her interested in Egyptology and osteology, Anne works on improving archaeological data management practices through her participation in an international, collaborative ethnographic research study on archaeological field schools.