2024-25 Graduate Student Research Fellow
About
Dora Gao is a PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History and a graduate certificate student in the Science, Technology, and Society program. They specialize in Greco-Roman Egypt, with research interests in religion, kinship, and colonialism (both ancient and modern). Their dissertation, currently titled “Affects of Belonging: Religious Kinship in Ptolemaic Egypt,” explores how the embodied presence of humans and beyond-humans in proximity to one another constituted forms of community and belonging illegible to the Ptolemaic state and the violence of its colonial archive.
During the fellowship period, Gao will draft their chapter studying codes of relationality in the Demotic regulations of religious associations. They will also begin work on a second chapter focused on a Greek text uniting scribes, farmers, and the land of Egypt against the extractive taxation of the Ptolemies.
