Hadeer Belal

Biography

Hadeer is now working at the Egyptian Museum Cairo at the Registration Collection Management and Documentation Department “RCMDD”.  Her role is to register and document the objects which have form part of the permanent collection at the EMC and been in storage for years due to expeditions, repatriation, confiscation or donation.  Hadeer started her job in 2022 and within a year she and the RCMDD team registered more than 1430 repatriated objects.  She is also working on registering the temporary exhibitions at the Museum, and helping scholars in their requests in finding objects for their research and inventorying the current locations of the objects in the permanent galleries. She also enriched her passion for temporary exhibitions, participating in a workshop titled “Organising Temporary Exhibitions from your Collections and Touring Strategies” organised by the Heritage Management Organization from 23-25 September 2022, online training programme.  In May 2023, Hadeer received the American Alliance of Museums Fellowship Funding and attended the 117^th Annual Meeting at Denver, Colorado, United States.

Hadeer gave a public lecture at the Egyptian Museum Cairo entitled “I received and my heart is satisfied” a new museological vision to display the Coptic Receipts, on the 19^th of September 2022. She has also participated in the temporary exhibitions at the EMC – writing the narrative, labels and panels of the Coptic objects.

Hadeer was a curator at the Coptic Museum in Cairo for ten years, specialising in Ostraca. Her primary aim at the Museum is to produce a comprehensive and wide-ranging database that collects information on all the objects within the museum, in order to make them more accessible to international researchers.

Hadeer organised workshops and temporary exhibitions beside her job as curator at the Coptic Museum; explaining the museum objects to the audience, registering the new objects and reorganising the museum library.  Hadeer had organised temporary exhibitions including Sweetness in the past and Tones of Civilisation at the Coptic Museum. She gave presentations within Egypt such as Motherhood in Ancient Egypt between Art and Literature, Coptic Museum and Exhibitions and Display, Islamic Art Museum. Hadeer has also participated in international conferences including a seminar on Coptic Papyrology at the UniversitatPompeu Fabra in Barcelona and ICOM conferences at the Bibliotheca Alexandria.

In 2019, Hadeer completed her master’s degree in Archaeology and Egyptology at Cairo University. Her thesis was a comparative linguistic study of Coptic legal documents. Now, she is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Archaeology Cairo University. She has the following publications:

• “Loan agreement”, Journal of Coptic Studies, Vol.19, 2017, pp.50-52.
• “Homologia relating to a loan, P.Heid. Inv. Kopt. 58”, Coptica Palatina. Koptische Texte aus der Heidelberger Papyrussmmlung, 2019, pp.102-104.
• “Agreement“, Ten Coptic Ostraca at the IFAO editors: Anne Boud’hors & Esther Garel,in: BIFAO 119, 2019, pp. 28-31.

At the British Museum

During her time on the International Training Programme in 2013, Hadeer was based in the Department of Egypt and Sudan and her partner placement was spent at Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford.

In 2013 participants are asked to prepare a project outlining an exhibition proposal based on the space and programme for the British Museum’s Asahi Shimbun Displays in Room 3.  Hadeer’s exhibition project proposal was entitled Egyptian water jars: Quenching the thirst across eras.

Her place on the programme was generously supported by the John S. Cohen Foundation.

Legacy Projects

In November 2015 Hadeer attended the ITP Mumbai Workshop Creating Museums of World Stories. The workshop was held at CSMVS and was attended by many ITP fellows from different years and countries, UK partners and British Museum Colleagues.

In 2016 Hadeer attended the Leicester University Museum Studies Conference with the ITP team and fellows from China, Turkey and Uganda. The group gave a workshop at the conference on Shared Histories and Global Voices.

In 2017 Nelson Abiti (Uganda, ITP 2013) successfully applied for an ITP collaborative award entitled The Road to Reconciliation. As a project partner Hadeer will contribute to the final products of educational resources, a touring exhibition and an updated permanent display.

In October 2018 Hadeer attended the ITP+ Course on Museum Interpretation in Aswan. Fellows and colleagues from Egypt, Sudan and around the world listened to interpretation case studies, participated in project work, sessions on label & panel writing and panel discussions on audience surveys and evaluations. The course was hosted by the Nubia Museum.

In May 2019 Hadeer visited Uganda as part of the ITP collaborative award project. She took part in a panel discussion on cultural heritage in Uganda.

In 2023 Hadeer was awarded two ITP Conference Grants (one carried over from 2022) to attend The XIIIth International Congress of Egyptologists at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the other to speak at the Current Research in Egyptology conference in Basel, Switzerland.
At ICE, Hadeers talk was entitled Coptic influence on Egyptian Heritage: Al- Manqab.
At the CRE, she talk was entitled Repatriated Treasures: The Collection of the Egyptian Museum Cairo.