Brittany Ellis

Brittany is a Ph.D. candidate in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture program. She is interested in the intersections of the arts and sciences, the cultural and political project of Orientalism, and the history of photography. Her doctoral research explores how the nascent practices of photography and archaeology came together in the mid-nineteenth century, investigating the role of photography in the articulation of archaeology as a scientific discipline and the visualization of the past.

Brittany received a B.A. summa cum laude in Anthropology from Harvard University and an M.Phil. in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford as a 2019 Rhodes Scholar. Her research in these programs explored digitization projects in museums, theories and practices of decolonization, and politics of labor and representation in archaeological excavations. She has worked on archaeological excavations in Macedonia and Jordan as well as at institutions including the Pitt Rivers Museum, the American Center of Oriental Research in Jordan, the Courtauld Institute of Art,  the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and the National Gallery of Art.