This talk focuses on a new UCSC Humanities course called “The Curse of the Mummy,” co-taught by Associate Professor of Literature Renée Fox and Associate Professor Elaine Sullivan. Combining analysis of 19th-century Egyptology’s transformation of ancient Egypt into a European fantasy with study of ancient Egyptian culture itself, the course relies on the collaborative expertise of an Egyptologist and a Victorian studies scholar to discover how and why the ancient past can become integral to contemporary identity, society, and aesthetics.

The talk will focus on the genesis of the course, some of the bizarre mummy literature it covers, the ways it relates to Professor Fox’s and Professor Sullivan’s current (and very different) research, and why mummies are a perfect subject to think about the intersections and divergences between different Humanities disciplines.

Renee Fox is Associate Professor of Literature, the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies, Co-Director of the Dickens Project, and Co-Director of the Center for Monster Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2023), co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of the forthcoming Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2025). Her other publications include essays and articles on topics ranging from Victorian acrobats to Dracula’s gothic realism to epitaphic form in Irish poetry, and she’s currently at work on a new book entitled Violent Reading: 19th-Century Ireland and the Politics of Genre.

Elaine Sullivan (M.A. and Ph.D. in Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sullivan is an Egyptologist and a Digital Humanist whose work focuses on applying new technologies to ancient cultural materials. Her born-digital publication, Constructing the Sacred (Stanford University Press, 2020, awarded prizes by the American Historical Association and the Archaeological Institute of America), utilizes a geo-temporal 3D model of the necropolis of Saqqara (near modern Cairo) to investigate questions of ritual landscape at the site. She was the project coordinator of the Digital Karnak Project, a multi-phased 3D virtual reality model of the famous ancient Egyptian temple complex of Karnak.

Slugs and Steins are free informal lectures served up over Zoom. Brought to you by the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Association, each talk will engage one of our favorite professors in discussion with you, the local community of Silicon Valley, and beyond. We will cover everything from organic artichokes to endangered zebras, self-driving cars to Shakespeare. All are welcome. Audience participation is encouraged.

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