Personal Statement
As a social and visual anthropologist, my work spans the arenas of cultural memory, critical heritage, material and visual culture, ethnographic filmmaking, and the intersections between anthropology and contemporary art. My fieldwork primarily has been in Romania, investigating sites and practices of remembrance work in post-communist Bucharest, with a focus on everyday objects, landscapes, images and discourses of memorialisation. I have also conducted fieldwork in ethnographic museums and archives, and I have done research on amateur film practices and family archives. My ethnographic films include Into the Field (2005), In the Light of Memory (2010), and Memory Objects, Memory Dialogues (2011, co-directed with Selena Kimball). Drawn to cross-disciplinary and exploratory methodologies, I co-founded the collective General Assn. with visual artist Selena Kimball. Our long-term art/anthropology collaborations and exchanges include exhibitions, film and video installations, collaborative fieldwork, and written texts.

I have an MA in Visual Anthropology from the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (2005), and a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media from the University of Manchester (2010). After completing post-doctoral research at the University of Gothenburg’s Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (2016), I held a post-doc in Artistic Research at the University of Gothenburg’s Valand Academy (now HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design), where I maintain an affiliation as Docent/Associate Professor in Fine Art. I joined the University of Liverpool in 2019 as a Lecturer in Communication and Media. I am part of the Culture, Space and Memory research group, and a founding member of the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life. Since 2022, I have been co-editor of the Journal of Anthropological Films.

Research Overview
I am currently working on three projects, all connected to mediations of memory and material/visual culture. My collaborative work with visual artist Selena Kimball (Parsons The New School, NY), 'Catalogue of Correspondence: A Collection of Rocks Found in the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture', incorporates experimental, decolonising approaches to engaging with anthropological museums and archives, proposing new forms and formulations of the ethnographic catalogue through affective, subjective and exploratory modes of artefact interpretation and categorisation.

My second project, 'The Silver Cord: Remediating Memory in the Family Archive', involves working with and re-editing a collection of 16mm silent home movies shot in the 1920s and '30s by my own ancestors who immigrated to New York from a small village in Belarus at the turn of the century. The work engages with broader anthropological debates investigating the entangled relationship between domestic archives, personal memory, and collective history, giving new filmic form to the roles and potentials of visual media in understanding what it means to view, reflect upon, and communicate about the past. It also draws upon methodologies inspired by the French Surrealists, engaging with the principle of automatism as an approach to access and articulate hidden memories, narratives and associations.

My third project concerns digital ontophanies and phenomenological approaches to screen-mediated communication, also in collaboration with Selena Kimball.

I would welcome the opportunity to supervise prospective PhD students interested in any of the above areas. I am currently supervising the following PhD students:

Shanshan Wu: The Breath of Memory: Transcultural Remembrance of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Chinese Moving Images

Sarah Okpokam: In Plain Sight: Photography and the Black Diaspora in Liverpool (1848 – 1948)