Willeke Wendrich

Willemina Zwanida "Willeke" Wendrich (born 13 September 1961, Haarlem) is a Dutch-American Egyptologist and archaeologist. She is Professor and Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology in the Near Eastern Language & Cultures Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 2016 she is the Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Education

Wendrich completed her Ph.D. at the Centre for Asian, African and Amerindian Studies (CNWS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands in 1993. The topic of her dissertation was Ethnoarchaeology and the social context of Ancient Egyptian basketry, which was subsequently published as The World According to Basketry by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology (CIoA) Press in June 1999. From 1995 to 1999 Wendrich was an assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology at Leiden University, stationed at the Netherlands Institute for Archaeology and Arabic Studies in Cairo. In 2000, Wendrich moved to Los Angeles and became an assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. She held the position of Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology in the same department from 2003-2009. During her tenure at UCLA, Wendrich became the Faculty Director of the UCLA Digital Humanities Incubator Group, and, in 2013, the Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at UCLA. She also served as the Co-director of the Keck Digital Cultural Mapping Program at UCLA from 2008 until 2012. At the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Wendrich held the position of Editorial Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press (CIoA) from 2011 until 2016.

Research

Wendrich has participated in projects at Çatal Höyük, Amarna, Elephantine, and Qasr Ibrim and directed excavations of her own.