Margaret (Maggie) Geoga
Assistant Professor
Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia and North Africa; Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; and the College
Margaret (Maggie) Geoga is an Egyptologist whose research focuses on ancient Egyptian literature, scribal culture, and textual transmission, as well as reception studies in both ancient Egypt and later periods. Her current book project focuses on “The Teaching of Amenemhat,” an enigmatic Middle Egyptian poem depicting the murder of a pharaoh. Combining textual criticism, material philology, and reception theory, the monograph investigates how this unusual and highly popular text was passed down, edited, and reinterpreted over the course of approximately 1,000 years by its many ancient readers in both Egypt and Nubia. Her other research interests include ancient Egyptian language, translation, literary theory, and the history of Egyptology, particularly during the Enlightenment.
Her research has been published in Middle Eastern Literatures, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, and Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur.
Geoga received a BA in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University. She earned a PhD in Egyptology along with a concurrent MA in comparative literature from Brown University. She is a junior fellow in the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. Before joining the University of Chicago, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania.