Dr. Carla Mesa Guzzo

Subject: Language Arts / Humanities

What will my child walk away with? Stronger critical thinking, sharper writing and research skills, and a genuine sense of intellectual agency — the experience of developing their own voice and perspective rather than simply receiving someone else’s. My ten years of university teaching at the University of Toronto, including fieldwork at some of Egypt’s most significant archaeological sites, inform a classroom approach that is both rigorous and genuinely exciting.

What can families expect? A teacher who is deeply invested in helping students find their own voice and develop their own thinking. I believe giving students agency is the key to genuine intellectual growth, and I design my classes around that principle.

What does class actually feel like? Curious and discovery-driven. My research takes me from mummification to imperial pageantry to ancient Egyptian literature, and I bring that breadth of fascinating material into the room. Students who did not expect to care about the ancient world consistently find themselves engaged.

How do you challenge a curious mind? I give students primary sources — texts, objects, images — and ask them to build an interpretation from evidence rather than accept a received one. That is what historians and archaeologists actually do, and bright students are more than capable of doing it too.

Credentials and Experience Ph.D. in Egyptology, University of Toronto (Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations). Thesis focused on the experience of imperial pageantry in ancient Egypt at the height of its empire. Fieldwork at major Egyptian archaeological sites spanning thousands of years of material. Ten years of experience as a teaching assistant and course instructor at the University of Toronto, teaching topics including mummification, ancient Egyptian literature, and hieroglyphs.