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“I’m fascinated by language in all its facets” – 5in10 with Wendy Doyon

Wendy Doyon is an historian of archaeology in modern Egypt and Sudan. She received her PhD in Middle East History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt, from 2022 to 2024, as well as a founding member of the Arabic Excavation Archive from Qift project at Harvard University. As a EUME Fellow, her research has two main areas of focus: the relationship between archaeology, labor, and state-building in nineteenth-century Egypt; and the language and social relations of archaeological production in Egypt, Sudan, and the Middle East through Arabic excavation diaries and archives.

Wendy Doyon in the archives. Photo: Private.

1. How would you explain your research to someone who is not an expert?

I study the history of archaeology in nineteenth-century Egypt and Sudan. I am interested in the inner workings of archaeology as a site of production where people work together to make something. We have a global system that can take a piece of pottery buried in the Egyptian desert and turn it into a book on a shelf in a big library far away, where someone can pick it up and read about the drinking cup a mother placed in her child’s tomb five thousand years ago. How does this global system of knowledge hang together?

I have two research projects for studying this. One is to understand how this scientific space for archaeology was carved out of the rural, agricultural landscape of nineteenth-century Egypt. It is common to hear that archaeology was a colonial system imposed by Europeans, but the reality is much more complicated. Egypt had its own government and military in the nineteenth century, and the Egyptian Antiquities Service was part of that. The other is focused on the people who work at archaeological sites. I dig through archives for fragments of photos, letters, diaries, and other field records to piece together the social world of archaeology. It’s a bit like an anthropologist traveling back in time to participate in and observe historical excavations to enrich our understanding of how language, culture, class, and social relations interacted in truly fundamental ways in the process of making knowledge about ancient Egypt and Sudan. The point of doing this ‘archive anthropology’ is to contribute to real structural change toward more collaborative archaeological research with, rather than about Egyptian, Sudanese, and Middle Eastern communities today.

2. What intrigued you when you started your academic journey?

I’m fascinated by language in all its facets. Our lives depend on it in every way, but language is a profound mystery. It comes from a deep unknown place in our brains activated by our parents and the world around us when we are barely conscious, yet it also connects us to every other person who has ever lived. It is absolutely central to who we are as humans. I remember choosing a final project for a sociolinguistics course in college (twenty-five years ago…), I was equally interested in the way online communities create their own digital dialects and in the different dialects of ancient Egyptian as it was spoken by everyday people. Egyptian history is inherently far more interesting than the Internet, so I tried academic Egyptology for a while but found it too confining.

After I’d been to Egypt and arrived at Arabic much later in my academic life, I heard about an archive of Arabic diaries kept in Boston, which were written by some of the famous archaeological foremen, known as Quftis, from Upper Egypt. These diaries are an extraordinarily rich and unique corpus of manuscripts, written in a mixture of Classical Arabic and two dialects of Egyptian Arabic, from Cairo and Upper Egypt, and including a special language of archaeological practice created by the community of Quftis from southern Egypt who wrote them. I committed myself to learning their Arabic and their work, to better understand their importance in the history of archaeology. Dialects are a poignant way to read history, because they take us into the lives and minds of people outside the norms of elite, state-sanctioned culture.

Photo of Banville, Tanis 1863 (Album photographique de la mission remplie en Égypte par le Vte Emmanuel de Rougé). Photo via Bibliothèque nationale de France.
 

3. What were formative encounters or challenges?

Egyptology’s lack of engagement with modern Egypt and Egyptians scandalized me. Around 2006, as I was finishing my MA and reading Donald Reid’s book Whose Pharaohs? it so happened that Don retired from his teaching career at Georgia State University and moved to my hometown of Seattle. Early on in our acquaintance, Don told me he had also been fascinated by ancient Egypt from a young age but had wanted to do something more relevant to modern life for his PhD. This inspired me to finally choose a path in history and follow in his footsteps. On a recent visit to Seattle, I visited Don and asked if he recalled that conversation. He had not, but we laughed and talked about the way knowledge passes from generation to generation. I think it is so important not to lose sight of that in academia, and to acknowledge the way we stand on the shoulders of others who share their knowledge with us. None of us are exceptional and there is no knowledge in isolation.

4. What do you consider to be the role of the humanities and social sciences in times of upheaval, fragmented publics, and authoritarian transgressions?

What keeps me up at night is the ongoing dispossession of the human mind by the new technology in our phones and computers. While we distract ourselves watching our governments fail spectacularly, the ungoverned billionaires and corporations who own our data are building mass, unregulated databases of human behavior and knowledge. They track, steal, collect, store, sell, and profit from every tiny bit of our online lives and then use that data to control what we do next. In league with emergent autocracies everywhere, these new forms of ‘biopower’ seem impervious to traditional forms of collective resistance. I think intellectuals and academics should be thinking and talking far more than we are about building mass digital resistance.

We need to move past the idea that open access is automatically democratizing knowledge. In the hands of this new kind of market-driven power, ‘open access’ is anti-social and anti-democratic, it reduces knowledge to behavioral algorithms that can be packaged and sold. We need to stop feeding AI and act collectively to resist the dispossession of our art, music, books, archives, and languages before the new ‘East India Companies’ of the digital economy colonize more than our lands and our bodies, but also our minds and our children’s and grandchildren’s minds. We are the last generations alive who will have ever known a pre-digital world. I think we have a responsibility to create and archive as much offline content as possible; and to continue producing basic research that is not for profit, but for the enrichment of human relations and understanding. Public and academic institutions are failing in this regard, so eventually we will need an alternative model to support knowledge production. When I despair, I think of something Ursula K. LeGuin said: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

5. What book, article, film, exhibition or song would you recommend, and why?

I would start with two 1970 films by the Egyptian director, Shadi Abdel Salam—his full-length feature, The Night of Counting the Years (المومياء) and the short film, Al-Fallāh al-Faṣīḥ (الفلاح الفصيح – The Eloquent Peasant)—and I would bookend those with Deena Mohamed’s 2023 graphic novel, Shubeik Lubeik. Together, they bridge two generations of Egyptian social commentary, connected by the deep and powerful humanity of Egyptian culture.


Citation: “I’m fascinated by language in all its facets” – 5in10 with Wendy Doyon, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 17.07.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/60186


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (July 17, 2025). “I’m fascinated by language in all its facets” – 5in10 with Wendy Doyon. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved November 11, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14d0b


Forum Transregionale Studien

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

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