Heritage Executive Team

The Centre for Heritage is led by a diverse group of academics and professional services heritage research staff. It incorporates a range of colleagues at different career stages and from different disciplines. These are our three co-directors:

Katie Markham

Lecturer in Media, Culture, Heritage - School of Arts and Cultures. My research lies at the intersection of heritage and tourism studies, where I have particular interests in the fields of 'difficult' heritage, community museology and the study of empathy, situating itself at the intersection of critical heritage, museum, and tourist studies. I am particularly interested in exploring the crossover between community museums and tourism in countries that are emerging from conflict. A monograph, dedicated to exploring these themes, will be published with Routledge in 2023. Alongside Dr Emma Coffield, I have also spent the last three years working on the project "Beyond Employability", which explores the perceptions and experiences of students looking to enter the creative and cultural industries. I draw strongly on critical race, intersectional and decolonial perspectives within my research, and am invested in questions of how to build an anti-racist University.

Laura Routley

Dr. Routley is interested in how imprisonment is memorialised, how colonialism is remembered, and how these play into contemporary politics locally, nationally and internationally. She is the Primary Investigator of the Afterlives of Colonial Incarceration: African Prisons, Architecture and Politics project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust [RPG-2021-386]. The project explores the memory politics around sites of incarceration in Africa, in three countries Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, exploring the spatial and architectural, as well as the political, aspects of how colonial sites (particularly sites of incarceration) are produced as heritage or memorial sites or reused in other ways. Her work therefore engages with the coalescence of space and time around locations and moments of colonial (especially carceral) violence.

Loes Veldpaus

Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Planning - School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape. My research currently focuses on the question “Who do we (not) care for, by (not) caring for this heritage?” I explore care and care ethics perspectives to help us rethink the ways we ‘do’ heritage. Care – rather than just conservation – includes a much wider range of practices, for example, the maintenance, use, engagement, governance, and rejection of heritage. More importantly, I think care can help us think through the ethics of conservation and the way it reproduces injustices as it shifts our focus from materiality to relationality, on ongoing care relations between people through heritage, and between people and heritage.