Room 146
Anthony Quickel is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge. His current project, Hapmen’s Enchanted Basin, follows the journey of a single block of stone across three millennia—from its carving as a pharaonic sarcophagus to its reimagining as an enchanted fountain in Mamluk Cairo and its later exhibition in London. Tracing this object’s changing meanings and uses, the project investigates how people across eras understood the powers of matter and form and the lines separating magic, medicine, and science. More broadly, his research examines how materials—particularly metals and minerals—were understood and utilized in medieval and early modern Egypt. His work contributes to the Metals, Minerals, and the Life Cycle Working Group within the collaborative project Agriculture and the Making of Sciences.
He received his PhD from the University of Marburg with a dissertation titled Egypt’s Quiet Sixteenth Century: Transformation and the Production of Knowledge Across the Mamluk-Ottoman Transition, currently being prepared as a monograph. From 2019 to 2022, he coordinated the EGYLandscape Project, a French-German collaboration exploring Egypt’s landscapes and environment between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. He was previously a researcher in the DYNTRAN (Dynamics of Transmission) Project (2015–2017) and has contributed to Ta’ziz Scientific Cooperation and TransOttomanica. Anthony is the author of several studies on Egypt’s premodern environmental history and coeditor of a forthcoming volume on Nature and Environment in the Mamluk Sultanate. Before joining the MPIWG, he taught Middle Eastern history at the American University in Cairo, where he also earned his MA. He is currently a guest lecturer at Bard College Berlin.
