Richard B. Parkinson

Richard Bruce Parkinson (born 25 May 1963) is a British Egyptologist and academic. He is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford and a fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. Until December 2013, he was a curator in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, British Museum.

Early life and education Parkinson was born on 25 May 1963. He was educated at Barnard Castle School, then an all-boys private school in Barnard Castle, County Durham. He read Oriental Studies (Egyptology with Coptic) at The Queen's College, University of Oxford, and graduated in 1985 with a first class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree.

Academic career Parkinson was a Teaching Fellow at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford from 1988 to 1989. From 1989 to 1991, he worked at the Department of Egyptian Antiquities, British Museum as a Special Assistant in epigraphy.

In 1991, Parkinson became a curator of the British Museum as Assistant Keeper of Ancient Egyptian pharaonic culture. His responsibilities included the maintenance and publication of ancient papyri written in Egyptian hieroglyphs and cursive hieratic, as well as inscribed material such as the Rosetta Stone. He was the supervisor of archived material, collections, and epigraphy, and the curator of the Nebamun wall-paintings. His inaugural lecture about the impact of ancient Egyptian poetry was accompanied by the actress and novelist Barbara Ewing, and was podcast. He is a professorial fellow of the Queen's College, Oxford, and has been a director and co-director of the Griffith Institute, Oxford.

From 1993 to 1998, Parkinson was editor of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. As well as academic monographs and articles, he has written popular books on Egyptology and also a short LGBT world history, dedicated to his husband. In 2016 he gave the Oxford University annual LGBT History Month lecture on this, which was podcast: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/great-unrecorded-history-lgbt-heritage-and-world-cultures. In 2004 he collaborated in a translation of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit into hieroglyphs.

Honours Parkinson was awarded an honorary doctorate from the New Bulgarian University, Sofia in 2006 for his contributions to Egyptology.

Personal life Parkinson is openly gay. He entered into a civil partnership with Timothy Griffiths Reid in 2005, and this was converted into marriage in 2014.

Parkinson has type 1 diabetes and has spoken about the intense difficulties of this condition in the competitive academic environment of Oxford, and also those posed by sexuality in his Faculty.