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Angela Piccini

Associate Member

My work investigates place and visual culture. I am interested in the production of place and space in small-screen broadcast and experimental documentary - from the ways in which screen media actively and ‘performatively’ make place through to the fluid materialities of production and reception contexts. To that end I am specifically interested in the ways in which archaeology, heritage and material culture are produced and received across television and convergent media; media audiences and reception; technological change and media, especially the impact of new database technologies on moving image material; and screen practice-as-research into place, material culture and narrative.

From 2006-08 I was principal investigator on an AHRC Landscape and Environment Network (with UWE and University of Aberystwyth) exploring transdisciplinary and mixed-mode research approaches to site, with a specific focus on the performative processes of emptying (http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/materialworld/11).

I am also co-investigator on the JISC-funded STARS (Semantic Web Tools for Screen Arts Research) project, with principal investigator Nikki Rogers (University of Bristol’s Institute for Learning and Research Technology) and project partner Watershed Media Centre. The project is developing leading-edge approaches to moving image databases to enable search, play, annotate and re-use functionality.

From January-September 2009 I am a Visiting Scholar at the University of British Columbia, in the Centre for Cinema Studies and in the Department of Anthropology. There I will be researching the ways in which media produced alongside the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games harnesses material culture and place in the production of specifically civic identities. I will also be collaborating on a participatory video project with Vancouver communities, which aims to produce alternative narratives of place.

Education :

  • 1999
    • PhD, Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Sheffield. Celtic Constructs: The production and consumption of heritage media in 1990s Britain.
  • 1992
    • MA, Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Sheffield
  • 1990
    • BA, Art History and English Literature, University of British Columbia

Current Position :

RCUK Academic Fellow, School of Arts, University of Bristol
Visiting Scholar, University of British Columbia

Awards and Grants :

AHRC Landscape and Environment Network (2006-08)
AHRC e-Science Workshop (2006)
BIRTHA small grant (2007)
Arts Council Exhibition Grant (2003)
University of Sheffield PhD Studentship
ORS Award
University of British Columbia Studentship

Selected publications :

  • Forthcoming
    • ‘Of fevered archives and the quest for total documentation’, in L Allegue Fuschini, S Jones, B Kershaw and A Piccini (eds) Practice-as-Research: in Performance and Screen Media. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Practice-as-Research: in Performance and Screen Media, co-edited with L Allegue Fuschini, S Jones and B Kershaw, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Beachley-Aust, 14-minute single-channel video response to Iain Biggs’ Debateable Lands.
  • In press
    • Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now, co-edited with C Holtorf, Bern: Peter Lang
    • ‘Guttersnipe: a micro road movie’, in C Holtorf and A Piccini (eds) Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Bern: Peter Lang
    • ‘Locating grid technologies’, Digital Humanities Quarterly (special edition edited by Tobias Blanke and Stuart Dunn)
  • 2007
    • Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory, co-edited with L McAtackney and M. Palus, Oxford: Archaeopress.
    • ‘Faking it: why the truth is so important for TV archaeology’ In T Clack and M Brittain (eds) Archaeology and the Media. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
    • A Survey of Heritage Television Viewing Figures, Council for British Archaeology Research Bulletin 1.
  • 2006
    • TV Heritage Counts Report commissioned by English Heritage, for Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
  • 2003-04
    • Guttersnipe, 14-minute video and performance presented at CHAT2003 (University of Bristol), TAG 2003 (University of Wales Lampeter), Pixelache 2004 (Helsinki, Finland), Orange Ashton Court Festival 2004 (Bristol).
  • 2003
    • An historiographic perspective on practice as research. Studies in Theatre and Performance 23 (3).
    • 'Practice as research in performance: from epistemology to evaluation', Digital Creativity, 15: 86-92 (with Baz Kershaw)
  • 1999
    • ''Good to think”: social constructions of Celtic heritage in Wales', (with R Pyrs Gruffudd & David T Herbert), Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17: 705-721
    • 'In search of Wales: travel writing and narratives of difference, 1918-50', (with R Pyrs Gruffudd & David T Herbert), Journal of Historical Geography 26(4)
    • 'Wargames and Wendy houses: Open-air reconstructions of prehistoric life', in N. Merriman (ed.), Making Early Histories in Museums, Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 151-172.
    • 'Welsh Celts or Celtic Wales? The production and consumption of a (not so) different Iron Age', in B Bevan (ed.), Northern Exposure, Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 51-63
  • 1998
    • 'Learning to think the past: heritage, identity and state education in Wales', (with R Pyrs Gruffudd & David T Herbert), International Journal of Heritage Studies 4: 154-167

Angela Piccini
e-mail: A.A.Piccini@bristol.ac.uk