Alisée Devillers is a Postdoctoral Fellow at NINO (2023-2025). She is specialized in ancient Egyptian art history and archaeology.
Her focus lies on non-elite visual self-presentation, i.e. the (self-)depictions of socio-professional categories which did not belong to the elite. Her PhD dissertation did record ancient Egyptian artist’ depictions and studied their social diversity and their visual presentations. She aims to expand on this topic during her postdoctoral stay at NINO by looking into other non-elite categories. This iconographic study focuses especially on how ancient Egyptians developed their own visual and textual identity on stelae—one of the less expensive commemorative monuments available to such a social group and one conducive to individual social expression—by borrowing and transforming high elite repertoire. The project borrows and adapts social sciences’ theoretical framework on identity definition and self-presentation.
She has been engaged in several excavations projects in Egypt and Iraq, trained within different museums (MRAH, Louvre, MUCEM, Egyptian Museum of Cairo) and did work as a scientific collaborator for exhibitions.
Ancient Egypt – Art History – Iconography – Self-presentation – Identity – Artist – Subelite
• 2022/2023: B.A.E.F. Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• 2021: Dissertation on ancient Egyptian artists’ self-presentations and visual identity (University of Liège, Belgium)
• 2016: MA thesis on Paheri of Elkab, an artist who became governor of his hometown and created his familial memorial (University of Liège, Belgium)
• 2013: BA in Art History, Archaeology and Museology at the University of Liège, Belgium
Forthcoming: with Prof. Dr. Kathlyn M. Cooney (UCLA), Arts Special Issue: Ancient Egyptian Art Studies, see https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/03RA9Q4X94.
Forthcoming: “New Kingdom Artists’ Self-(Re)presentation: A Case Study (TT 181)”. In Gema MENENDEZ and Inmaculada VIVAS, “Distinguised Above Others”. Proceedings of the conference held in Madrid, June 16-17, 2022, Abercombry Press.
2023: with Dr. Toon Sykora (RMO): “Enhancing visibility – Djehutihotep’s painter Horameniankhu”. In: BIFAO 123, 53-81.
2023: “Un art sans artiste... vraiment ? Pour une approche iconographique : les (auto)représentations des praticiens de la Hmw.t”. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Egyptologists (ICE XII). 3rd-8th November 2019, 393-402.
See my Academia.edu profile: https://leidenuniv.academia.edu/AliseeDevillers