Project Team
Christine Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History at Western Washington University, and a Natural Environment Area Editor for the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. She earned her Ph.D. from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a focus on the Archaeology of Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, and the Near East. She currently works with the Kissonerga-Skalia field project in Western Cyprus, but has also excavated in Israel and Turkey, as well as Vancouver, Canada. Her research centres on the cultures and history of the Ancient Mediterranean world, particularly on economic exchange and cross-cultural interaction. In addition to the study of political economy, she is active in research on environmental and climate change in Ancient Egypt with colleagues from the University of British Columbia, and co-edited a recent volume on Ancient Egypt and the Environment. Christine is also a co-founder and video producer for Peopling the Past, a new digital humanities initiative launched in Fall 2020. Peopling the Past produces and hosts open-access multi-media resources for teaching and learning about real people in the ancient world and the real people who study them. Since 2017 she has been a volunteer instructor at the North Shore ElderCollege, running short courses each spring on different cultures of the ancient world for retired learners.
Alan Wheeler is a graduate student at Western Washington University in the History department. His research interests include the development of the state and empire in the Ancient Near East, the role of donkeys in ancient economies, and the representation of the ancient world in media. He is currently finishing his master’s thesis, which examines the role Herodotus’s Histories plays in furthering Orientalist tropes of Persians, including the ways the text has been interpreted today in movies and other aspects of popular culture. Alan hopes that 3D printed objects can help students engage with the ancient world, in addition to providing students with new ways of studying and interacting with history.
Alexis Nunn is a graduate student at Western Washington University in the History department. She is a specialist in Medieval European History, focusing in particular on the subjects of religion and identity. Her thesis is on heresy and community identity in the thirteenth century.
Erin Escobar recently completed her master’s degree in History at Western Washington University, where she studied the American commemoration of atrocity. She will be attending St. Mary’s University in England in the Fall of 2021, where she will study to gain her certification to teach in secondary schools. She has two cats, MJ and Fox.