Our Experts - Heritage

Read about our tutors who teach on the MA in History.

The staff who teach and supervise courses and modules can vary due to staff changes including research and other types of leave.

Chris, brown short hair, moustache smiling at the camera.

Dr Christopher Donaldson

I contribute to the MA module 'Critical Heritage Studies' and co-supervise the 'Outreach, Heritage and Public History Placement' and 'School Placements' MA modules.

My research is primarily concerned with the cultural history of landscape, with an emphasis on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have a particular interest in print history as well. My current research projects include Envisaging Landscapes and Naming Places: The Lake District before the Map (2021–2022), which is funded by the British Academy. In addition, I co-edit the Digital Forum for the Journal of Victorian Culture and edit The Ruskin Review.

Dr Christopher Donaldson's profile

Professor Fiona Edmonds

I am a historian of medieval Britain and Ireland, with research interests ranging from the sixth century to the twelfth. My work knows no borders, focusing on maritime connections and now-lost kingdoms. Particular areas of interest are the Irish Sea region in the Viking Age, and 'Middle Britain' (northern England and southern Scotland) prior to the Anglo-Scottish border, investigating links between the kingdom of Northumbria and the Gaelic-speaking world, and the connections between Northumbria, Strathclyde and Wales. I am interested in interdisciplinary work, for example combining historical and linguistic evidence through the study of names, and I am the Director of the Regional Heritage Centre.

Dr Fiona Edmonds' profile
Fiona Edmonds

Professor Patricia Murrieta-Flores

I supervise the MA module 'Spatial Technologies for Historical Analysis'.

My interest lies in the application of technologies for the Humanities and my primary research area is the spatial humanities. My main focus is the investigation of different aspects of space, place and time using a range of technologies including Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning and corpus linguistics approaches. I am very interested in interdisciplinary research, particularly looking at the intersections between Humanities and all sorts of technology. I am also the Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University, and Principal Investigator on the Transatlantic Platform (T-AP) funded project ‘Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large-scale computational analysis of 16th century historical sources’, as well as Co-Investigator in multiple projects.

Professor Patricia Murrieta-Flores' profile
Professor Patricia Murrieta-Flores
Professor Corinna Peniston-Bird

Professor Corinna Peniston-Bird

I am a regular contributor to the MA, and convene the MA Module 'Creative Voices: History and Fiction'. I have co-edited with Sarah Barber two edited collections on genre methodologies emerging from the MA module 'Beyond the Text'. My research focuses on femininities and masculinities at war, spatial and genre methodologies. My work on oral testimonies is centred on the relationship between memories and cultural representations. I am currently working on gendered commemoration, with a particular focus on British war memorials.

Dr Corinna Peniston-Bird's profile

Dr Nicholas Radburn

I am a historian of the Atlantic World, with a particular focus on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, currently investigating slave-trading merchants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and how their profit-motivated decisions shaped the experiences of the enslaved people who they bought and sold.

I am a co-manager of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded project Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a digital memorial to the 12.5 million Africans who were forcibly transported through the slave trade. I am also developing a digital model of a slave ship, and a database of British slave trading merchants, including several thousand individuals in north-west England.

Dr Nicholas Radburn's profile
Dr Nick Radburn

Dr Sam Riches

As a cultural historian of the late medieval period, with a special interest in the cults of pseudo-historical saints, I have published extensively on the cult of St George, and have also worked on the cult of St Ursula. My primary research interests lie in the presentation of gender identity and the role of encounters with the monstrous, both in written narrative and visual motifs associated with popular devotion to saints. I am the Academic Co-ordinator of the Regional Heritage Centre, having worked as the Co-ordinator of its predecessor organisation, CNWRS, since 2009. I have responsibility for arranging study days and other public events, managing the Centre's oral history archive and overseeing heritage consultancy and other activities.

Dr Sam Riches' profile
Sam Riches
Dr Deborah Sutton

Professor Deborah Sutton

I co-convene the MA module 'Critical Heritage Studies'. My research work explores the extraordinary capacity of digital technologies to rethink the resonances and meanings of the past in the present. I co-created a dedicated software platform, safarnama, that allows complex heritage to be mapped out across Indian urban space and explored using a mobile phone (the safarnama app is available from the Google Play Store). I have recently begun an AHRC-funded project that will use a digitised corpus of texts and cartographic materials to explore water scarcity in Coimbatore in South India. This project is a collaboration with the National Library of Scotland and it aims to create both trusted data relating to water scarcity and innovative visualisations relating to local strategies of water management.

Dr Deborah Sutton's profile