Center for Early Culture Fall Quarter Lunchtime Talk presents:
Egyptomania in a Golden State
with
Ian Straughn
Department of Anthropology at UCI
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Friday, October 31, 2025
Humanities Gateway, Rm. 1010
Please RSVP by or before Monday, October 27th
I regularly teach a course entitled “Egyptomania” that explores the cultural construction of the now global Egypt phenomenon. While it has roots both in biblical and archaeological scholarship and popular culture that have shaped key moments in the narrative of Western civilization, in this talk I will look at its more recent form within California. I want to explore the question of whether there is a Californian Egyptomania, that was nurtured in its particular settler colonial project. Is there a throughline that connects the Rosicrucians, Snoop Dog, Disney, The Irvine Ranch, LegoLand, and so many more, all of which have produced Golden State specific iterations of Egyptomania in legitimating their claims to this land. One goal is to springboard a project to map/capture all potential examples of Egyptominia in California, perhaps by developing an AI tool that can scrape them from the internet, then have students "ground-truth" them archaeologically.
