Christopher Heaney is a writer and assistant professor of Latin American history at Penn State. He is the author of Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology (2023) and Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu (2010), published in Peru as Las Tumbas de Machu Picchu: La historia de Hiram Bingham y la Busqueda de las últimas ciudades de los Incas (2012). A graduate of Yale University, he worked in journalism, including a stint at the oral history project StoryCorps, before earning his Ph.D. in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written on Peru, the Incas, the history of archaeology, ancestors, and the dead for The New Yorker, the New York Times, and The Atlantic. He was the co-founder of The Appendix, a journal of narrative and experimental history, which can be visited at theappendix dot net. He was born in West Australia, grew up in New Jersey, and currently lives in State College, PA. His website is at christopherheaney dot net, and he's @chrheaney on Twitter.
