Rebecca Wang

I'm Ziting (Rebecca) Wang, an Egyptologist and Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancien Mediterranean Studies at Penn State. My work centers on a question I find endlessly fascinating: how did people from radically different cultures – Egyptians, Hittites, Babylonians – actually talk to each other three thousand years ago, and what happened when the message got lost in translation?

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I earned my Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, following an M.Phil. from Cambridge and a B.A. in History from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My research traces diplomacy, communication, and political theater across the New Kingdom world, from royal gift ceremonies to the strange case of a king's missing gold statues. I have participated in excavations at sites in Egypt, Turkey, and Israel. 

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When I'm not teaching hieroglyphs, I'm probably still thinking about ancient small talk gone wrong.