Dr. Kara Cooney: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World

In this interview, Kaveh Ghaemi speaks with faculty researcher Dr. Kathlyn “Kara” Cooney about her journey and how her life helps motivate her research. Professor Cooney is a professor in Egyptology at UCLA, a writer, and a former television personality for her show Out of Egypt, which aired on the Discovery Channel. Her career as a researcher has been painted with several published articles and four books, the latest of these being The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. She also authored the 2014 biography The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt. She studied German and humanities in her undergraduate education at the University of Texas, Austin before she went on to earn her master’s and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kaveh: So, you went to undergrad in Texas for German and humanities. How was the transition
from undergrad into your Ph.D. program where you found Egyptology? What was that transition
like, and how did you find what you wanted to study?

Dr. Cooney: It’s much easier today to figure out what it is you want to do. To find out if something exists, if there are programs out there, simple Google searches will do. So, there’s that much more information out there. I didn’t realize that I could do Egyptology as a study until I applied for the Marshall scholarship and was a finalist for that program. To do the Marshall program, you have to do a master’s program in Britain. So I looked up all of these programs in Britain and got familiar with what the areas of study in English higher or British higher education were. Then when I did not get the Marshall, I was like, okay, I’ll apply for graduate school in the same categories and then applied to American institutions that had similar things. So, it was only that competition that forced me to look at what else was out there. As for the humanities degree, that field was the only major I could do that allowed me to study ancient Egypt, because most universities don’t have ancient Egyptian study–they’ll have classics with heavy Greek and Latin requirements. I knew I wanted to study the ancient world, but in a particular African and West Asian context, and they didn’t have that as a possibility. So, I found this major as a way of kind of getting around that lack of discipline focus. Then, I got lucky–I got accepted into three programs, one funded me and I went to the place where I got funding. In retrospect, it was the best place for me. I showed up without Egyptian hieroglyphic knowledge and I learned Egyptian. I did grammar that first year, and was able to really hit the ground running. I was also accepted without a master’s, which wouldn’t happen in the competitive environment today.

Kaveh: What was your experience applying and choosing a place to study for your master’s and then Ph.D? Any tips you might be able to offer to students trying to pursue a similar path?

Dr. Cooney: Well first off, you should only do a PhD if it’s fully funded–full stop. If you can’t get it fully funded, just don’t go. If I were looking at students applying here who didn’t have a master’s, but they did have access to Egyptian, then I would be very interested. So, it depends on what kind of background they have. Only the most elite schools usually, but not always, have access to the language training that I would be looking at. It depends on what it is you’re hoping to do. Sometimes you don’t need the master’s. The master’s is kind of an interesting thing, too, because many universities use it as a means of making money and job creation. If you feel you need a master’s and you spend two years there, you’re going to have a student debt easily of over $100,000. And then you’re ready to go to a PhD program fully funded. Well, is it fully funded? I don’t think so. You just went into a tremendous amount of debt to make that a possibility.

Kaveh: Interesting. Back on your research process, how has your writing process changed from back when you wrote your first article in 2000 to now–where you’re four books down, with multiple articles? A lot of our students might not be writing for a book now, but eventually, does that process differ when you’re doing an article versus a book?

Dr. Cooney: It will always differ. When you write your first books as a younger scholar, you’re going to have to footnote like crazy. You’re going to have to prove that you’re standing on the shoulders of other scholars, and you will have to keep your own analysis contributions heavily supported by those other scholars’ thoughts, more so than maybe you would like. As you mature into the field, you’re still going to cite people, but you have the ability to claim your thoughts more than a younger scholar can. I’m not saying there aren’t brave and ballsy younger scholars out there who don’t come out with big ideas, they do. But any younger scholar knows they need to couch it in a methodology, a theoretical framework, and a scholarly historiography that supports them. Because otherwise, you’re that younger scholar that’s going out on a thin tree branch. You’re creeping out and you’re going to fall. Academia is a cruel, narcissistic world, so you need to support yourself as a younger scholar more than anything. My first book, The Cost of Death, has so many footnotes. And in my first article from 2000, in some places there’s more footnotes than there are texts. You have to pay your dues in academia, and then you’re able to go out and say something brave and bold when you have more power and are less frightened of what people could do. I know there are other fields with a more nuanced opinion on this, that no, you should be going out there and saying something new. I’m not saying that you don’t, but that if you do say something new, you’d better couch it in the right framework. It’s not math where if you come up with a theorem, it’s there, you’ve done it, you know? That’s a humanity-specific thing that you have to prove yourself because it’s already very difficult to get funding and things like that.

Kaveh: How do you find a research topic when you’re just starting out? Should you avoid trying to make a grand claim and focus on something smaller?

Dr. Cooney: This is where you have to do a lot of reading because you don’t know what people haven’t looked at until you look at what people have done. And so, there’s a lot of reading and study. That’s why for my students doing PhDs, coming up with their dissertation topic can take four years of research and study and presentations and all of that. So, then they say: “Oh, there’s a gap here, or I could fit in here, or this needs to be redone.” Once you have that foundation, it’s easier to figure out what your big contribution should be. During that process, those four years, of course, for three or four years, you’re going to be assigned lots of presentations and papers, and some are going to be duds. Some aren’t going to go anywhere, you just dive in and integrate into the field and start reading a lot. The way I see it is, when you’re working on something where there’s a massive data set that hasn’t been processed in a way that you think it needs to be processed, then you’ve got something. Data is just data, though. So, if you’re dealing with data, but you don’t have good research questions to ask that data, then you could end up doing something very descriptive, that’s not really analysis–you’re just presenting the data and anyone could do that. I’m often telling students, “you’re not asking a ‘how’ question, you’re asking a ‘what’ question.” You want to make sure that your research is contributing new ideas with that data. For example, let me give up my work, put my work on coffins out there. People have been working on [Egyptian] coffins for as long as Egyptology exists, the last 200 years, and they go after it in a very typological way: Is this coffin of the 20th dynasty or the 21st? Or they go at it from a very religious perspective: Is this coffin showing the worship of a particular divinity and who’s worshipping? But, when I decided to go after coffins from the perspective of cost and value, and then from the perspective of reuse, then I looked at the coffin in a completely different way from somebody who was looking at it for these other research questions. Because I was looking at it with that research question in mind, people tell me: “oh my god, I’ve never looked at coffins the same way again. I can’t believe you’ve gotten all of this from coffins.” It’s not because I thought, I’m able to see things in a way that you can’t, it’s because I came to it with a different research question. I thought, what data set could help me to deal with this, like how people compete with each other using displays of crafted objects? What data set? Ah, the coffin. If I just keep it to the coffin, that’s useful because it’s an individual person of a specific gender, of a specific spending ability, from a specific place with a specific title. So I’ve got all of this social data, And then I can go from there into talking about spending abilities and trade routes to get wood and or minerals, and I can go off in a different direction. So, the larger research question is essential for facing any data set. You can ask a really superficial, boring question of a data set and really not do much with it. Or you could ask something and think, this blows everything up. Now I have to look at everything again with this new idea in mind, so that’s where the magic comes in. That’s where you’re then learning to look and analyze something in a way that no one has ever done it before. You have to come up with a new methodology–and that’s probably one of the most fun parts of my career.

Kaveh: You have a very extensive career built on taking your research and then producing it in a digestible way for very diverse audiences, whether it’s on Discovery Channel or it’s on Craig Ferguson or here, in academia. How do you apply your research and make it appealing to a variety of people, instead of a very narrow scope of academics?

Dr. Cooney: That’s a strange gift that I have. I think what it essentially demands of me is that I put myself into the position of ‘beginner’s mind.’ When you have somebody who’s just approaching a topic, they ask questions that the second-year student would never ask and might even laugh at. But that naivete is very useful because it makes you ask something that is going to draw everyone in rather than asking something that is so in the weeds that people won’t know what you’re talking about. Once you do the PhD process and become a scholar, you’re an academic, and you’re generally engaging in research questions that most of the public doesn’t give a sh*t about. They really don’t care. They’re like, okay, whatever it is you’re doing, that’s weird and different and strange. My mind tends to be a little more scattered and more like a sieve than a trap, so I think in some ways that helps me to connect with the public, I’m always going back to the original questions of: Why does this matter? Why is there this big man-made mountain out in the desert that we call a pyramid? Why is it the only one like this that has straight sides? Then you can apply those questions that somebody might be asking who’s watching, you know, ancient aliens on History Channel.

Kaveh: I think it’s really interesting that you can find something that’s not directly connected to you, and you can attach yourself to it in a very personal way. Was it easy for you to find a sort of personal entry into ancient Egypt? And do you have any advice for others on how to tap into that?

Dr. Cooney: I use my personal life all the time. This isn’t about why I love Egypt or why I’m attracted to Egypt–a question that no Egyptologist asks another, because we know there’s no answer. It’s so weirdly emotional, but for example, I don’t think I could have written ‘The Woman Who Would Be King’ unless I had had a child, given birth–given birth naturally. I don’t think you have to be able to give birth naturally to be a writer about women, but it sure helped. I think it helped for me to write ‘The Woman Who Would Be King’ by having gone through a really horrific divorce and court situation, seeing how the legal system supports men. It was helpful to me to see that systemic inequality applied to me. It’s not just giving me empathy for people of the past, but helping me to see an ancient system as inherently unequal. It’s helpful to have gone through those processes as somebody on the receiving end of that power inequality and to be able to write about that power inequality. For example, if you go and read books on women in the Egyptian world, you’re going to find a whole lot of books that are laudatory, positivist, where women could rule. Women were amazing. Don’t bring in modern politics, don’t bring in patriarchal systems and how they f*ck women over systemically and you get this idea of an overall more positivist view of a Hatshepsut or a Nefertiti or a Cleopatra. I’m coming in from the perspective of a woman in power: I’m the chair of my department. I’ve been doing this work for a while and I have reached a place of power, but I also know what it means to have a system work against you. So it’s a useful thing to have to have suffered through those things and I wrote about the women in a different way because of it. Yeah, that’s really interesting. That goes back to even what we just talked about with, you know, finding the parallels and antiquity back to today and even in your personal life. I think that’s like in my writing specifically, if I don’t have a personal connection like that, it won’t be interesting. Honestly, I’m not compelled to continue writing it.

Kaveh: Thank you so much for sharing that. The last question I have is a bit more practical. What do you think makes a good research paper and do you have any final advice for students for overcoming research challenges in their writing?

Dr. Cooney: I always tell my students to pick something that upsets you or puzzles you, such that you just have to figure it out. It should be something from the world around you that upsets you. If it’s
something so abstract that you can’t even really get at it, then you’re just doing academic masturbation, right? I mean, what’s the point? What does it matter? In my opinion. So, if you’re looking at something where you’re like infanticide, for example, that’s really interesting. How do we commit it? What is that about? How does this work? Or why does a woman in power, even Hatshepsut, not have a legacy? Why
can’t she give the power to her offspring? Why does it have to go to another line or whatever? If it’s something that you find intriguing from your own world, and then you go to the ancient world to look at a data set, then it’ll be meaningful to you. The way that I tell it, this is a little explicit, but I think it works for students, is that studying the ancient world is studying humanity without any sorts of barriers to consequences. We have lots of ways of stopping bodily consequences from happening. If you’re having sex and you have an IUD, you’re not going to get pregnant. But studying antiquity is a way of raw dogging life. You could get some herbal matter and stuff, but good luck to you, the repercussions of being a human animal are more real in the ancient world than they are in its appearance to us today. All of those things still exist. That’s why, say a student is like, wow, I just saw somebody with fake breasts and so much plastic surgery in their late 20s. What’s that about? I’m like, ah, okay. So, let’s think about how women are objects of the patriarchy and how to maintain their value. They have to maintain that objectified value. You could write a whole research paper on makeup and hair extensions and from the ancient world and ways of maintaining some sort of youth. It’s an interesting thing that Cleopatra is known as a medical practitioner of maintaining good skin and a youthful appearance. She knew she had to be because she wasn’t ruling alone. She needed those Roman warlords to protect her. She needed to maintain that value to them. Even though she is ruler of the wealthiest place on earth, she still needs to look hot for a Roman warlord to get military protection. If that doesn’t tell you something about the modern world that we live in today, I don’t know what does. So if it makes you angry, go to that research paper. If it’s something that really gets at you, it’s going to be the best research paper. That’s where I see women and men really doing their best work in my Empowering Women class on gender inequities and the way the human body can control us. I also teach my students to not necessarily listen to what a field is telling you; the field of feminism right now is very much controlled by white women. It’s all about transcending one’s gender and sexuality, rather than looking at how women are exploited and controlled and contained by their gender and sexuality. For that, I have to go to sociology and I have to find the poor Black and Latino woman who is pregnant eight times and can’t get out of her situation. I have to go to sociology. Feminist discourse is not going to help me on that. They barely talk about it at all. So, if you can’t find what you need in a particular discourse, and you thought it should be there, then go to another. But it’s the anger and the rage that often, or just dissatisfaction or dis-ease or confusion, that’s going to lead to the best paper–and if you’ve got that, then you’re asking a why or how question.