Dominic Montserrat


Dominic Alexander Sebastian Montserrat was a British egyptologist and papyrologist.

Early life and education

Montserrat studied Egyptology at Durham University and received his PhD in Classics at University College London, specializing in Greek, Coptic and Egyptian Papyrology.

Academic career

From 1992 to 1999 he taught Classics at the University of Warwick. Suffering since birth from hemophilia, his increasingly deteriorating health led Montserrat to resign from teaching in 1999 and take up a research post in the classics department of The Open University. In 2004, he died from the effects of his illness at the age of forty.
Despite his ill health Montserrat was remarkably productive in his brief scholarly life: he was a member of the committee of the Egypt Exploration Society, for which he published regularly, and curated the award-winning travelling exhibition Ancient Egypt: Digging For Dreams of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. A wider audience saw him co-presenting the TV documentary series The Egyptian Detectives, a production of National Geographic Channel and Channel Five.
In his 1996 debut book Sex and Society in Graeco-Roman Egypt Montserrat presented a broad study of ancient sexuality and its cultural manifestations in Greco-Roman Egypt. His second book focused on the life and times of the "heretic pharaoh" Akhenaten, whose long afterlife as an object of modern interpretations and appropriations he critically analyzed.

Selected works