Episode 153: Notting Hill with Kate Sheppard and Colin Colbourn

This week Kate Sheppard and Colin Colbourn return to ask if Notting Hill is the greatest romcom of its generation.

About our guests:

Dr. Kathleen Sheppard earned her PhD in History of Science from the University of Oklahoma in 2010. After a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at the American University in Cairo, she arrived at Missouri S&T in the fall of 2011. She teaches mainly survey courses on modern Western Civilizations, which is arguably one of the most important courses students in 21st century America can take. Her main focus is on the history of science from the ancient Near East to present day Europe, United States, and Latin America. She has taught courses on the history of European science and Latin American science, as well as a seminar on women in the history of science.

Sheppard’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century Egyptology and women in the field. Her first book was a scientific biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain (Lexington, 2013). Murray’s career spanned 70 years and over 40 publications. Sheppard is also the editor of a collection of letters between Caroline Ransom Williams, the first university-trained American Egyptologist, and James Breasted from the University of Chicago (Archaeopress, 2018). Sheppard’s monograph, Tea on the Terrace, is about hotels in Egypt as sites of knowledge creation in Egyptology during the discipline’s “Golden Age,” around 1880 to 1930.

Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age was published in July 2024. It has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and was a top 6 Reader’s Choice non-fiction book on Goodreads.

Dr. Colin Colbourn is the Lead Historian for Project Recover, where he manages historical operations to locate and identify U.S. service members missing in action from past conflicts. He is a graduate of Ball State University and went on to earn his MA and Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Southern Mississippi. His work at Project Recover blends family outreach, archival research, case analysis, and global field investigations to bring home missing service men and women. At Project Recover, Dr. Colbourn works with an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, oceanographers, marine scientists, and engineers in order to apply modern technology to the mysteries of the past. Dr. Colbourn also teaches U.S. Military History as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Delaware.