Peter Dorman

Peter Fitzgerald Dorman is an epigraphist, philologist, and cultural anthropologist. He currently serves as the president of the American University in Beirut (AUB). He spent most of his career as a professor and chair in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) of the University of Chicago, and was director of Chicago House and the Epigraphic Survey project of the Oriental Institute.

He is arguably the leading non-Egyptian expert on the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, and occasionally spars with Zahi Hawass over the interpretation and appropriation of artifacts and texts associated with this period and their relevance to modern Egyptian identity and pride.

Peter Dorman is also an amateur lyric tenor in Chicago, performing with Golosa (The University of Chicago Russian Choir), the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of The University of Chicago, and various other groups.

Peter Dorman has been recently elected as the fifteenth President of the American University of Beirut.

Peter Dorman is an international leader in the study of the ancient near east, and in particular the field of Egyptology, in which he is a noted historiographer, epigrapher and philologist. He is the author and editor of several major books and many articles on the study of ancient Egypt and is probably best known for his historical work on the reign of Hatshepsut and the Amarna period. His most recent monograph, Faces in Clay: Technique, Imagery, and Allusion in a Corpus of Ceramic Sculpture from Ancient Egypt (2002), examines artisanal craftsmanship in light of material culture, iconography, and religious texts. In 2007, he and Betsy M. Bryan of The Johns Hopkins University came out with an edited volume titled Sacred Space and Sacred Function in Ancient Thebes.

An accomplished academic leader and administrator, since 2002 he has chaired with great success the distinguished Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at one of the world's top research universities, the University of Chicago. Prior to that, he spent nine years (1988-1997) heading the epigraphic efforts at Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt. From 1977 to 1988, he worked in curatorial positions in the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.