Jen Thum is the Assistant Director of Academic Engagement and Assistant Research Curator at the Harvard Art Museums, where she creates learning experiences for Harvard students with works from across the collections. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Barnard College, an M.Phil. in Egyptology from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University. She is a specialist in the art and archaeology of ancient Egypt and has conducted archaeological fieldwork since 2006 in Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan, Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia.
Before arriving at Harvard, Jen worked in various capacities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. For her dissertation research—which centered on Egyptian royal monuments carved into rock outcrops—she was awarded fellowships from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and the American Research Center in Egypt, as well as a Spatial Archaeometry Research Collaborations fieldwork award from the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies.