Iméra - Institute for Advanced Study of Aix Marseille Université
France
fellow
Judit Garzón Rodríguez
2026-2027
Country of origin (home institution)
Germany
Discipline(s)
Archeology and prehistory
Theme(s)
Other
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Judit Garzón Rodríguez is an Egyptologist working at the intersection of archaeology, social and cultural history, cognitive approaches, and digital humanities. She completed her PhD in Egyptology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2023. Her research focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of ancient Egypt, with particular attention to everyday religion, material culture, object biographies, and processes of meaning-making through objects, texts, and images.
She is especially interested in how identities, beliefs, and social practices are constructed and negotiated, as well as in the ways modern scholarly frameworks shape interpretations of ancient evidence.
She has conducted research and fieldwork in Egypt, Spain, and Greece, and has held research stays and academic positions across Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Until September 2026, she was Visiting Professor at Northeast Normal University (China) and scientific coordinator of the HERMES Data Competence Centre at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz.
Research Project
Echoes of the Nile. Reconstructing Object Biographies in the Musée d’Archéologie Méditerranéenne through Digital Methods
Objects as Travellers of the Mediterranean
Across the Mediterranean, objects have constantly been in motion – carried across seas, exchanged between cultures, collected, reinterpreted, and recontextualised over time. Museums today bring many of these trajectories together in a single place, where artefacts from very different historical worlds are displayed side by side. Yet behind each object lies a far longer and more complex history than what is visible in the museum gallery.
What can ancient Egyptian objects tell us if we follow their journeys across time, space, and cultures?
The project Echoes of the Nile explores this question through a focused study of Egyptian artefacts in the Musée d’Archéologie Méditerranéenne in Marseille. Rather than treating museum objects as static remnants of the past, this research approaches them as travellers with long and complex biographies – objects that have moved, changed meaning, and been reinterpreted across thousands of years. Following these trajectories means paying attention not only to origin, but also to transformation. Objects can shift meaning as they pass through different hands, institutions, and historical contexts. An artefact might begin its existence in ancient Egypt as part of a ritual, a burial, or everyday practice, before entering very different networks of circulation, collection, and interpretation in later periods. Each stage adds new layers of meaning, while sometimes obscuring earlier ones.
At its core, the project brings together Egyptology, Museum Studies, and Digital Humanities to rethink how we tell stories about cultural heritage – shifting from isolated artefacts to interconnected histories.
Research Interests:
Egyptology; Museum ; Digital Humanities; Mediterranean