Victoria Almansa-Villatoro

Victoria Almansa-Villatoro joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Prior to joining Yale, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2022–2025) and completed her PhD at Brown University in 2022. Her main research interests include ancient Egyptian language and writing in context, social relationships and interaction, and the intersection between religious and official structures of knowledge and discourse. 

She is currently working on her first monograph, The Ethics of Service: Politeness and Persuasion in Ancient Egyptian Letters (c. 2400–2200 BCE), which investigates how ancient Egyptians, including pharaohs, harnessed the power of language and rhetoric to compel others in ways that resonated with their community values. In addition to demonstrating how linguistic and communication theory can shed new light on ancient texts, this book questions the assumed prevalence of hierarchy, inequality, and social distance in ancient Egyptian interactions by shifting the focus to peer interconnectedness and reciprocal care. 

Almansa-Villatoro’s future projects seek new evidence to reconstruct the ancient Egyptian social and religious beliefs through a fresh approach to the sources—one that considers how indirectness, ambiguity, humor, hieroglyphic semiosis, and other communicative strategies convey meaning. Her secondary interest in multilingualism and dialect variation will culminate in a sociolinguistic study of the earliest attestations of ancient Egyptian. She has co-edited three volumes and authored more than 25 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on topics ranging from literacy to Egyptian understandings of meteoritic materials. Her research has received media coverage in outlets such as National Geographic and NewScientist. 

Among her ongoing projects are the publication of a large, completely untranslated collection of 3rd millennium BCE papyrus fragments from the Brooklyn Museum, and collaboration with the AERA archaeological mission in Egypt to study and interpret newly uncovered pharaonic seal impressions from the pyramid complexes of Giza.