Carina van den Hoven

About

Carina van den Hoven is Research Fellow at NINO, Affiliated Researcher at the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities, and Member of the Research Unit UMR 8546 « Archéologie et philologie d’Orient et d’Occident » at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE/PSL), École Normale Supérieure (ENS), and Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Since 2017 she is Director of the Leiden University Mission to the Theban Necropolis, which undertakes a fieldwork project in and around Theban Tomb 45 in Sheikh ʿAbd el-Qurna, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the West Bank of Luxor (see www.StichtingAEL.nl). Van den Hoven’s expertise and research interests in Egyptology are in the function and materiality of ancient Egyptian temple decoration and tomb decoration, and the practices and rituals they reflect. Her research focuses not only on pharaonic Egypt, but extends into the Graeco-Roman period, and addresses in particular the topics of textual and iconographic transmission processes, uses and reuses of the past, cultural memory, and cultural identity in ancient Egypt. Van den Hoven’s research interests also include landscape archaeology, memory studies, cultural heritage management, and the field of digital humanities and its applications to Egyptology, and in particular the use of digital techniques in the documentation, material analysis, and publication of ancient wall paintings. Van den Hoven's fieldwork project at Theban Tomb 45 forms the starting point for her current research project on tomb reuse, which focuses on the questions of how secondary tomb owners dealt with the past in reused tombs, and how they inserted their own memory into the existing decoration of these tombs. Her interdisciplinary approach challenges traditional outside-in interpretations by combining theory and methodology from the fields of Memory Studies and Landscape Archaeology, which enables her to explore tomb reuse in terms of the interaction between mortuary practice, cultural memory, and the physical features of the mortuary landscape. In doing so, she aims to allow for a deep-level understanding of this understudied phenomenon and to contribute to wider cross-cultural discussions on the reuse of mortuary spaces and on the functioning of mortuary landscapes and the tombs therein as dynamic spaces through which memories were constructed, preserved and transferred across generations.

Education