Angela McClanahan
Angela McClanahan
- Academic Development Lead; School of Fine Art Ethics Lead
- ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5873-6836- Professional Title
- Lecturer
- Job Title
- Academic Development Lead; School of Fine Art Ethics Lead
- School or Academic Area
- School of Fine Art
- School or Academic Area Supervised for
- School of Fine Art
- A.McClanahan@gsa.ac.uk
- Professional Address
- The Glasgow School of Art | School of Fine Art | Stow Building | 43 Shamrock Street | Glasgow | G4 9LD | UK
Biography
Angela examines relationships between material pasts and presents. Her research has spanned the representation of Neolithic remains in contemporary Scotland and contemporary ruins in Edinburgh and the Midwest. Recent work examines kinship and materiality in Appalachia, and ethics in contemporary art and museology.
She has published in peer-reviewed journals and critical volumes including Visual Studies and Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, and serves on the advisory board for Visual Culture in Britain. She co-founded the Atelier research network at the University of Edinburgh and has participated in and been Co-I for RCUK projects.
Prior to GSA, Angela was Associate Professor of Museum Studies at Western Illinois University, and held lectureships at the Universities of Edinburgh and Leeds, and a teaching post at the University of Glasgow.
She holds a PhD in archaeology from Manchester University, an MPhil in archaeology from Glasgow University, and a BA in anthropology from Fort Lewis College.
Research Interests
Material culture/materiality/materialisms; 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.
Grants
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
PGR Supervision Interests
-Deep/recent historic time and its relationships to presents and futures;
-Ruination, decay and 'undoing';
-Ethics in contemporary art and museological practice, including relationships to anthropological codes of ethics, repatriation and reparations;
-Prehistory and fabulation.
Current PGR Students
Rosie Dahlstrom: An Ancient Face: The Uses of Beauty from Amarna to the Present Day (Provisional title)
Susan Torrance: Liberating the Archive: using creative practice to investigate a redundant physical newspaper collection
Former PGR Students
Previous PhD Students:
2023: Dr Molly Miller, Brought Alight and Alive: Community Re-use of Church of Scotland churches. University of Edinburgh.
2022: Dr Estefania Piñeiros, Walking in Quito: Urban Imaginaries in the City Centre. University of Edinburgh.
2016: Dr Rebecca Crowther, Wellbeing and Self Transformation in Natural Landscapes (Published as Palgrave Macmillan monograph, 2019). University of Edinburgh.
2015: Dr Panos Kompatsiaris, Crisis and the Limits of the Political Turn in Contemporary Art Biennales (Published as Routledge Monograph, 2017). University of Edinburgh.
2015: Dr Xavier Contier, Education, reform and symbolic projection in the early twenty-first century, at the National Galleries of Scotland. University of Edinburgh.
Teaching
PhD supervision.
Latest Additions
- McClanahan, Angela (2025) Funerary Photographs as Enduring Kinship and Community Ties in Twentieth-Century Appalachia and Transappalachia: Material and Relational Methods. Journal of Appalachian Studies, 31 (1). pp. 33-43. ISSN 2328-8612
- McClanahan, Angela (2023) Project Loops, “Edgelands” and the Permanent Reimagining of Landscape. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 10 (1). pp. 124-138. ISSN 2051-3437
- McClanahan, Angela (2019) Local Populations and Global Heritage. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York. ISBN 9783319517261
- McClanahan, Angela (2017) Factish Field: Generative Discords in Art and Anthropology. In: Towards a City Observatory. Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, pp. 143-153. ISBN 9781873653197
- McClanahan, Angela (2016) Detroit MLS 2020. In: The Happy Hypocrite: Accumulator Plus. Bookworks, London. ISBN 9781906012779
- McClanahan, Angela (2016) Unsettled: Jennie Temple's Ethnographic Objects. In: Exhibition catalogue for Jennie Temple: Ruined. Freemocco's House, Deruta, IT.
- McClanahan, Angela (2015) The Ethics of Landscape: Discourses of Cultural and Environmental Sustainability in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site. In: World Heritage, Tourism and Identity. Routledge, London. ISBN 9781315546315
- McClanahan, Angela (2014) Archaeologies of Collapse: New Conceptions of Ruination in Northern Britain. Visual Culture in Britain, 15 (2). pp. 198-213. ISSN 1471-4787
- McClanahan, Angela (2013) Curating Otherness in Neolithic Orkney: A Contemporary Monumental Biography. Visual Studies, 28 (3). pp. 262-270. ISSN 1472-586X
- McClanahan, Angela and Holt, Ysanne (2013) Northern Peripheries. Visual Studies, 28 (3). pp. 203-206. ISSN 1472-586X
