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 four co-directors:

John Pendlebury

Professor of Urban Conservation - School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape. My research mostly focuses on conservation values and social purpose and the way this translates into strategies of management. It is drawn together in my book Conservation in the Age of Consensus. Broadly the work divides into two themes: 1) Empirical and conceptual work on the interface between cultural heritage policy and other policy processes e.g. social inclusion & regeneration. This interface poses challenges for considering which values are dominant in motivations for heritage protection (e.g. art historical values vs. ‘public values’). 2) Conceptual work based primarily on city case studies of how historic cities have been planned in the past, particularly in the mid-C20, focusing in particular on how the historic qualities of such cities were conceived and balanced with modernising forces

Joanne Sayner

Reader in Cultural and Heritage Studies - School of Arts and Cultures. My research expertise is in the politics of remembering in contemporary culture. My interdisciplinary work research bridges cultural studies, memory studies, heritage studies, gender studies, and media studies. It addresses both tangible and intangible heritage in terms of contemporary memory cultures, with particular focus on the UK and the German contexts from the post-War period to today, and with special emphasis on gender. I am particularly interested in how challenging histories are represented, contested and mediated through different forms of memory and what this tells us about our understandings of history, heritage and identity.

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.

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.