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Dr Amy Staniforth

Collections’ Director
MA (University of Nevada, Reno), PhD. (University of Birmingham) Photograph of Dr Amy Staniforth.

Contact

Email: mws@aber.ac.uk
Office: FF5
Phone: 01970 622024

Responsibilities

In addition to being a post-doctoral researcher I am Centre for Performance Research (CPR) Collections Manager responsible for a mixed media collection including archival materials, books, journals and rare books, and recordings (published and unpublished) for the use of department staff, students, artists and the public. This involves:

  • Cataloguing: accessioning backlog and new material, cataloguing books onto the AU and Resource Centre catalogues, box listing,  finding aid creation, shelving, archival collection description to ISAD(G) standards, policy development (e.g. collection and appraisal), volunteer and assistant supervision. 
  • Preservation assessment: research and establishment of appropriate standards for special collections e.g. environmental standards and preservation concerns, monitoring, cleaning, supervising volunteer work, security measures.
  • Facilitation of access and promotion of research: organising, publicising, recording and publishing (on CADAIR) International Theatre Collection (ITC) seminar events, maintenance of CPR Collections department webpage, volunteer recruitment and assistant supervision, hosting class visits and talks, creation and dissemination of CPR Collection newsletter, liasing with relevant local and national bodies, and dealing with public, professional and academic enquiries about the resources and archive.


Additional Interests

I am a student member of the Archives and Records Association.



Research

In my current research I explore the archival significance of dwelling from the perspective of performative and geographical understandings of place using my own ongoing experience of building a house as a case study.

Objectives include:

-          To examine contemporary personal narratives of the self-build experience in online blogs; to ask what is unique about these publications, what they might be able to teach us about both sense of place, recording experiences, and shared narrative acts

-          To examine historical traces and records of dwelling; to ask what these records may or may not tell us but also what does doing the research mean for the house builder? How is the constructed place changed by the research?

-          To examine the contemporary record-making that building a house generates; to ask what happens to these records, how homes become embedded in social, political, environmental networks through these records and how it feels to have an at-once physical and bureaucratic experience documented in this way – how might it develop our sense (and performativity)of place?

More broadly:

I have wide and interdisciplinary interests in the history of collecting, epistemology, and public and popular representation of postcolonialism, empire, and environments. These interests have taken me to study literature and environment in the US and conservation work in East Africa and my PhD explored the cultural national and transational narratives of the discovery of human origins in Tanzania at a time of both decolonisation and global interest in East African nature.

I retain an interest in the history and representation of science and the environment but am also interested in the epistemology of collections and archive use – in turning on its head the idea of practice-as-research in order to consider research-as-practice. 

Biography

I joined the Department in 2008 to work on the International Theatre Collection recently deposited at CPR Collections by John Cavanagh and have since gained responsibility for CPR Collections more generally, including its public face in the Resource Centre. I am working towards my MSc. in Archives Administration in the Department of Information Studies and for more information on the development of CPR Collections please take a look at our webpage:

 http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/tfts/research/groups-grwpiau/perf/cpr/coll/

 



Staff Publications

Conference Presentations and Seminars

“Performing/archiving: engagement experiments with academic users” ARA, Edinburgh, August 2011.

“Ancestral landscapes: Origins and Olduvai in the 21st century” EAAPP conference, Arusha, Tanzania, August 2009.

“Ancestral landscapes: Origins and Olduvai in the 21st century” AHRC Living Landscapes, Aberystwyth University, June 2009.

“Consuming nature in East Africa” Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, December 2007.

 

“Returning Zinj: Popular and museological consumption of the objects and     landscapes of human origins” Pitt Rivers Museum Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography Seminar Series, Oxford, November 2006.

 “Olduvai Gorge: Palaeontology and Heritage in a Tanzanian Landscape” UNESCO Cultural Landscapes, Newcastle, April 2005.

 “Human Origins and African Nationalism: National Geographic’s Africa, 1960-1963”. Beyond the Global and the Local, Durrell Institute, Corfu Town, June 2004.

 

Publications        

“Returning Zinj: human origins and the museum in twentieth century Tanzania.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 3.1 2009, 153-173.

“The Cradle of Humankind”: Palaeoanthropology and Heritage in a Tanzanian Landscape. Paper Presented at the Forum UNESCO University and Heritage 10th International Seminar

“Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century” Newcastle upon Tyne, April 2005 Revised: July 2006: http://conferences.ncl.ac.uk/unescolandscapes/files/STANIFORTHAmy.pdf