
Dr. Julia Troche is currently the director of undergraduate studies and teaches in the Department of History at Missouri State University. She specializes in courses on ancient Egypt, the ancient Near East, archaeology and ancient history, world history, and sometimes Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs. She co-founded both the American Research Center in Egypt, Missouri Chapter (where she serves as vice president) and the annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium.
Her first book, published with Cornell University Press in 2021, is titled "Death, Power and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt: The Old and Middle Kingdoms" and explores the social, religious and political ramifications of the deification of certain special dead. Her research also explores material culture (e.g. funerary cones and epigraphic graffiti studies), education in ancient Egypt, contemporary pedagogies of teaching ancient history and Egyptomania—the obsession and appropriation of ancient Egypt throughout history.
Affiliations:
Dr. Troche is an Egyptologist. Her primary areas of interest include ancient Egyptian social history and religion, but she also conducts research on the histories of the ancient Near East and the Classical world. She has worked as an excavator, field surveyor and epigrapher at Abydos and Luxor in Egypt, and at Petra, Jordan. Before coming to Missouri State, Dr. Troche taught undergraduate and graduate courses on ancient Egyptian art, history, religion and hieroglyphs at her alma mater, UCLA.
Additionally, Dr. Troche has helped develop education outreach materials and programming: she co-curated the exhibition Uncovering Ancient Egypt: Ancient Crafts, Modern Technologies in 2014, worked with PublicVR to help build an exemplar of a virtual ancient Egyptian temple, and continues to write articles for the young adult history and archaeology magazines Calliope and Dig.
Selected publications:
Egyptologist Dr. Julia Troche discusses her book, “Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt: The Old and Middle Kingdoms.”
Egyptologist Dr. Julia Troche offers some insights.
Egyptologist Dr. Julia Troche shares about the Unwrapping Ancient Egypt symposium at MSU.