Ella Karev is an Egyptologist, papyrologist, and social historian who works on enslavement and bound labor in Egypt. She earned a PhD with honours at the University of Chicago in 2022, focusing on slavery and servitude in Egypt’s Late Period (c. 900–300 BC), and continued at the University of Chicago as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities from 2022-2023. Her forthcoming book, Physical Descriptions, Biometrics, and Eikonographia in Graeco-Roman Papyri from Egypt, investigates personal descriptions in Greek documentary texts from Egypt, including those of enslaved persons.
As a Turin Humanities Programme fellow, Dr. Karev will complete a manuscript titled Enslavement and Othering in Ancient Egypt (c. 1200–30 BC): Prisoners, Orphans, and Foreigners, which compares the experience of enslaved persons as an othered population with groups of people that were also excluded from the social fabric of Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Ptolemaic period.
