The Collector has published a podcast episode featuring Dr Kathleen (Kate) Sheppard, in which she discusses the women whose work shaped the field of Egyptology but who are rarely remembered alongside its most celebrated moments. The conversation, released on 24 August 2026 as part of TheCollector Podcast, sets out to recover the contributions of women whose notes, correspondence, teaching, research and professional relationships helped build the discipline.
As The Collector frames it, Egyptology tends to be remembered through its most dramatic episodes: the archaeologist at work in the field, a tomb brought to light, a discovery that enters the history books. Sheppard's argument, according to the episode, is that behind those famous moments stood women whose labour was essential yet often went uncredited. Their teaching, their letters and their research underpinned the achievements more usually attributed to the men who fronted excavations and publications.
The episode centres on the kinds of work that seldom feature in accounts of great discoveries. Notes and correspondence, the everyday business of running research and maintaining professional networks, and the slower work of teaching and study are all part of how a scholarly field takes shape. By drawing attention to these activities, the discussion invites listeners to reconsider who did the work that made Egyptology possible, and how the record of that work came to be shaped in the way it was.
The subject fits within a wider interest in the people behind the discipline's history rather than only its headline finds. Recent coverage has examined the careers of individual pioneers and the question of women's participation in the ancient culture itself, including evidence for women's literacy in ancient Egypt. Sheppard's contribution turns the lens instead onto the modern study of Egypt and the women who advanced it, many of whom have been comparatively overlooked in standard histories of the field.
For readers who want to follow the conversation in full, the episode is available through The Collector. It offers a route into thinking about how the history of Egyptology has been written, and about whose names have tended to survive in that telling. Those drawn to the ancient script itself can also learn to read hieroglyphs with the Hierolyte app, and approach the inscriptions that generations of scholars, women among them, worked to understand.
The discussion is presented as an interview, giving Sheppard space to set out her research and to explain why the contributions she describes have so often slipped from view. It is a reminder that the shape of a discipline reflects not only its discoveries but also the choices made about whose efforts are recorded and remembered.