Julia Viani Puglisi received her B.A. in Classical Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied the urban impact of the goddess Isis in the Roman city of Herculaneum. She received an MA in Egyptology at Indiana University, Bloomington, with a thesis that explored the application of computational linguistics in the identification of phonetic word-play in Late Egyptian texts. At IU she also worked under Dr. Bernard Frischer and the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory with a photogrammetric project at the Uffizi Museum in Florence.

In addition to being a researcher at the Harvard Giza Project, she is writing her dissertation on the Central Field cemetery at the Giza, which initially supplied stone for the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre before transforming into a unique burial site. Her interests also include: phonological development, hieratic paleography, cosmogonies and ontologies, monumental texts, graffiti, symbolic architecture, and ancient cultural memory. 

Puglisi co-organizes the graduate student workshop Methodologies in Egyptology and Mesopotamian Studies (MEMS; 2019 – present) and Premodern States and Empires (2018-2020). She also leads an informal workshop on Late Egyptian hieratic entitled Songs of Longing and Pleasant Entertainment (2019-2020). She has taught EGY 150 – Voices from the Nile: Ancient Egyptian Literature in Translation (Fall 2019/2020) and TF'd for GENED 1099 – Pyramid Schemes: What Can Ancient Egyptian Civilization Teach Us? (Spring 2020/2021).