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 co-directors:

Susannah Eckersley

Susannah Eckersley is Professor of Critical Heritage and Memory Cultures at Newcastle University and Director of the AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership. Her research is interdisciplinary, with expertise in identities, contested belonging and populism; memory and difficult histories; migration, diversity and representation, in Europe. She addresses the ways these issues are represented, reflected or neglected in the work of museums and heritage, in commemorations and protests, and in the wider politics of heritage and memory. She leads the AHRC-DFG funded collaborative research project ‘Cultural Dynamics: Museums and Democracy in Motion’ (2023-2026). She has led and participated in several international research projects. Further details are available in her full bio. She is founding co-editor of the Routledge book series ‘Critical Heritages of Europe’, a member of the advisory board of Museum Friedland and has published on museums, heritage, memory, culture and belonging.

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.