Faculty

Erin Peters holds a joint position as Lecturer in Curatorial Studies in History of Art and Architecture and as Assistant Curator of Science and Research in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. CMNH holds the majority of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh’s objects from ancient Egypt, and Peters is interested in the disparate ways Egypt is collected and displayed across the institutions. She hopes to expand this dialogue by thinking cross-museum-wide for exhibition projects and programming that combines the resources and collections of all four CMP. This investigation will be a springboard for considering the past, present, and future of museums as she develops courses for the Museum Studies Minor in HAA.

Peters’s focus stems from her research specialization in temples built in Egypt under the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, who annexed Egypt into the Roman Empire in 30 BCE. She has conducted three seasons of field research at temples in Egypt, some of which are in the process of being cleaned, revealing brilliant polychromy. Her research of polychromy is the basis for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s MediaLab and Department of Egyptian Art collaboration, “Coloring the temple of Dendur.” The collaboration (re)colored the Augustan temple of Dendur using projection mapping technology to engage museum visitors by showing the temple in a way it had yet to be seen at the Met – in (virtual) color. The Met’s project is an example of the kind of collaborative work that Peters believes will be integral to the future of museums.