Katherine Blouin

Biography

I have a PhD in Roman History from the Université Laval (Québec City, Canada) and the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis (Nice, France), and a Postdoctoral Diploma in Greek Papyrology from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris, France). My work centres on socio-economic and environmental history, with a focus on ancient, and particularly Roman, Egypt, as well as on the ethics and (de)colonial entailments of Antiquity-related fields.

I have written about the Judaeo-Alexandrian conflict, the environmental history of the Nile Delta, multiculturalism, cultural and religious identities, as well as Lands, (non)-Human beings, and periods that are commonly considered to be ‘marginal’. I have also worked on the cataloging, restoration, and digitization of the Greek papyrus collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and have edited Greek documents on papyri and leather from that collection, as well as from the Franco-Italian mission at Tebtunis.

My current work focuses on the ways in which imperialism and Orientalism have impacted (and are still impacting) the fields of Classics, Papyrology, and Egyptology, and how these entanglements manifest themselves in (settler) colonial contexts. I am a co-founder and editor of Everyday Orientalism, the editor of the volume The Northern Land: Histories of the Ancient to Modern Nile Delta (under review, CUP) and the co-editor (with Ben Akrigg) of the Routledge Handbook of Classics and Potscolonial Theory.  Lastly, I am working on a book project entitled Inventing Alexandria, which explores the history, historiography, and reception of pre- to early Hellenistic Alexandria.

Education

B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (Laval and Nice)