Trained in anthropology and archaeology, Angela specialises in critical approaches to ancient and contemporary materiality, broadly conceived. Her early research explored the representation of the prehistoric past in contemporary archaeological and heritage contexts. Specifically, she used ethnographic and visual methods to examine the portrayal of Neolithic ruins in the Orkney Islands in historic and contemporary folk narratives, archaeological policy, and people's experience of the Orcadian landscape in the early 21st Century. She subsequently examined people's experience of industrial and post-2008 ruins in Edinburgh and the Midwest United States, and their role in looping and unfinished development projects over time. Both of these research areas converged in an AHRC project co-investigated with PI Professor Ysanne Holt of Northumbria University, that examined the legacies associated with conceptions of 'The North' in British artistic production, governance, folk and popular culture. Currently, her work explores class and kinship relations as embodied in the circulation of artefacts from Appalachia (specifically Eastern Kentucky), in particular the human and more-than-human significances of giving, receiving and porting funerary photographs in 20th Century Appalachian migration to the industrial Midwest. She is also examining ethics in contemporary art and curatorial practices.
She has published in numerous peer reviewed journals and critical volumes, including Visual Studies, Visual Culture in Britain, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, Journal of Appalachian Studies, and in edited collections relating to ruination, ethnographic methods in archaeological research, and on the relationship between art and anthropology. She has also co and guest edited for both Visual Culture in Britain and Visual Studies, and peer reviews for Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury, Berghann, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, Landscape Research, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Post-Medieval Archaeology and Journal of Visual Art Practice. She is currently a member of the Advisory Board of Visual Culture in Britain.
Angela has both co-directed and participated in research networks that focus on materiality, material culture and art practice.
2015-2021: Co-founder and co-Director: Atelier: Creative Arts and Social Sciences interdisciplinary research network, University of Edinburgh. Profs. Richard Baxstrom and Neil Mullholland, co-Directors/Founders.
2006-7: Invited participation in 'Consensus or collision?: A site-specific approach to integrating methodologies for studying and managing the historic environment’. University of Oxford, funded by Research Councils UK (Arts and Humanities Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council).
Prior to taking up her current position at the GSA, she was Associate Professor of Museum Studies at Western Illinois University in the USA. She has also held lectureships in museology and visual culture at Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Leeds, and was a teaching fellow at the University of Glasgow. Just before and briefly during her academic career, she worked in collections at small history and archaeology museums.
She holds a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Manchester, an MPhil in Archaeology from the University of Glasgow, and a BA in Anthropology from Fort Lewis College, USA.
Material culture/materiality; ethics in contemporary art and curatorial/museological practices; ruination; representing the past in the present; photographs as relational objects; ethnographic methods; prehistory and fabulation; materiality and the more-than-human.
2024-2025 University Research Council Grant Award: ‘Funerary Photographs as Enduring Kinship and Community Ties in 20th Century Appalachia and Transappalachia. Western Illinois University. $3122.
2024: Provost Travel Award, Western Illinois University, March 7, $700.
2022: Provost Travel Award, Western Illinois University, November 9, $700.
2022: Provost Travel Award, Western Illinois University, March 31, $700.
2012-2014: AHRC Networks Grant: ‘Northern Peripheries: An International Network’ (Co-I with Professor Ysanne Holt, Northumbria University). £20000.
2011-2013: Challenge Investment Fund, University of Edinburgh: ‘Capital Ruins’. University of Edinburgh, £8528
-Deep time and its relationships to presents and futures;
-Ruination (broadly conceived);
-Ethics in contemporary art and museological practice, including relationships to anthropological codes of ethics, repatriation and reparations;
-Prehistory and fabulation.
2015 – Panos Kompatsiaris, Crisis and the Limits of the Political Turn in Contemporary Art Biennales (Published as Routledge Monograph, 2017).
2015 – Xavier Contier, Education, reform and symbolic projection in the early twenty-first century, at the National Galleries of Scotland.
2016- Rebecca Crowther, Wellbeing and Self Transformation in Natural Landscapes (Published as Palgrave Macmillan monograph, 2019).
Fine Art Critical Studies Y4 dissertation supervision.
