Saturday Lecture Series: Journey to the Afterlife

Come on a Journey to the Afterlife with archaeologist Dr Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek and explore everything from beliefs and practices to tombs and funerary equipment.

Using key pieces from the exhibition Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs, Macquarie University’s Dr Mourad-Cizek explains how pharaohs, princesses, artists and others prepared to join the realm of the dead, to become eternally divine.

Recorded live at the Australian Museum on 23 December 2023, as part of the Gateway to Egypt program series, created to support Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs exhibition.

Dr Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek is an archaeologist and historian who explores the links between cultural encounters and socio-cultural transformations. Her research focusses on relations between ancient Egypt and Western Asia during the Third and Second Millennia BCE. She received her PhD from Macquarie University for a thesis on the ‘Rise of the Hyksos’ and Egyptian-Levantine relations from the Middle Kingdom to the Second Intermediate Period (2014).

She was later a postdoctoral fellow with the ERC Advanced Grant project, 'The Enigma of the Hyksos' at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2017-2020). In 2019, she was awarded a Macquarie University Research Fellowship for a project investigating networks of contact and exchange in the first half of the Second Millennium BCE. Dr Mourad-Cizek has worked with archaeological expeditions in Australia and Egypt. She currently teaches archaeology at the University of Sydney, holding honorary research fellowships at Macquarie University and the Australian Institute of Archaeology.

Fran Dorey is Head of Exhibitions, at the Australian Museum, leading the Exhibition team responsible for the curation, design, preparation and maintenance of the Museum’s permanent, temporary and touring products.

She has co-curated and project managed some of the AM’s most ambitious exhibitions including 200 Treasures, Dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurs – Meet the Family, Aztecs, Alexander the Great, Life Beyond the Tomb, Art of the Pharaohs and Climate Change – our future our choice.

Fran has a BA (Honours) majoring in archaeology and ancient history from the University of Sydney and a Dip Ed (Secondary) from Charles Sturt University. She remains passionate about archaeology and history, as well as palaeontology and palaeoanthropology, and writes and maintains the AM’s popular Human Evolution webpages.

Macquarie University is a Program Partner for the Australian Museum’s Gateway to Egypt program, part of the Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs exhibition.