Todd Hickey becomes Director of CTP

November 9, 2011

Todd Hickey has assumed the role of Director of the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri. First recruited to Berkeley as a half-time papyrologist working in the Center (within The Bancroft Library) and initially teaching half-time on soft money, Hickey later garnered a tenure-track position in the Department of Classic for the academic side of his position. To accompany his promotion to tenure as of July 1, the CTP Advisory Committee recommended and the Vice Chancellor for Research approved his succession to the role of CTP Director, replacing Donald Mastronarde.

This development marks the successful completion of the initial phase of CTP operations. The Center was created as an Organized Research Project in 2000 following a campuswide competition for the establishment of new research units, and it began its activities in July 2001, when Hickey first arrived on campus to serve as papyrologist/curator with the support of the seed funding awarded to CTP. During the past ten years, through the efforts of Hickey, graduate student researchers, postdoctoral scholars, and students in the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program, CTP gave preliminary cataloguing to thousands of neglected papyri, stored them in archival-quality folders and cabinets, and prepared for and executed two moves of the entire collection in conjunction with the seismic retrofitting and improvements to the Doe Library Annex. Hickey played a key role in planning the new space now dedicated to the collection's vault, research workstations, and reference library. Research into the history of the collection led to the recovery of the Reisner Papyri from Boston and over 1,500 Tebtunis fragments from Oxford. Progress is being made on the preparation of several new volumes of The Tebtunis Papyri. Scholarly collaborations have been established with many other collections and papyrologists in the U.S. and abroad. Through CTP, Berkeley has been a co-recipient of NEH grants supporting the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) Project and a subcontractor of an NEH grant to researchers at Brigham Young University experimenting with multispectral imaging. The Center has sponsored graduate students participating in excavations in Egypt, in papyrological conferences, and in an exchange program with the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project in Oxford.

Hickey is an expert on the economy of late antique Egypt, but has also extended his research agenda to include the earlier periods represented by the Tebtunis papyri owned by Berkeley and by other collections. He is active in the American Society of Papyrologists, APIS, and the Association Internationale de Papyrologues, and is a leader in efforts to strengthen the standing of papyrology worldwide. For more on his publications and activities, see his faculty page.