Julia Viani Puglisi

Julia Viani Puglisi studies landscape change in the Central Field quarry-cemetery of the Giza Necropolis. Her research investigates how anthropogenic sites are maintained, reused, and transformed over time, with a particular focus on the architectural, art historical, and prosopographical dimensions of tombs built within a quarry that once supplied limestone for the pyramid complexes of Khufu and Khafre. Drawing on archaeological documentation and 3D modeling, she traces these transformations to reconstruct a social history of the Giza Plateau after the pyramids were built. Her broader areas of inquiry include ancient site management, quarry archaeology, local practices of tomb construction, memory studies, and the socioeconomic dynamics of third-millennium Egypt.

Puglisi has been working in the Central Field at Giza with the support of an American Research Center in Egypt-Council of American Overseas Research Centers Fellowship (2022–2024) and the Margaret Weyerhaeuser Jewett Memorial Fellowship (2024). At Harvard, she co-organized the graduate student workshop Methodologies in Egyptology and Mesopotamian Studies (MEMS; 2019–2022) 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).

 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.