Project Team
The Human Remains Project began in November 2019 and will run for 4 years in the first instance, with a possible additional 3 years of research to follow. It is funded through a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship (UKRI FLF), spearheaded by Dr Ruth Nugent. She and the project team are based in the department of Archaeology, Classics & Egyptology, at the University of Liverpool.
The team members are:
Dr Ruth Nugent - Principal Investigator and UKRI Future Leader’s Fellow
Ruth is the Principal Investigator (or head) of the Human Remains project (which she devised) and is a UKRI Future Leader’s Fellow. As an archaeologist specialising in Britain’s mortuary cultures from the 5th century AD onwards, Ruth is passionate about our inherited dead. Her MPhil examined how the living perceived and interacted with cremated and inhumed bodies in early medieval England. Her Leverhulme-funded PhD (University of Chester, 2016) traced physical interactions with cathedral bodies, burials, and monuments from the 7th to 21st centuries. Having enjoyed various positions in mortuary archaeology and digital humanities at the universities of Chester, Exeter, and Lancaster, she combines archaeological, textual, and visual evidence with digital methods to explore long histories of burial management.
Dr James Butler - Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Research Assistant
James is the Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Research Associate on the project. He has a background in onomastics and spatial psycholinguistics and his doctoral thesis examined NER processes and archetypal emotional characteristics of place-name generics in textual namescapes. His active research interests include spatial stylometry, descriptive language, the cognitive processes underpinning association, and adapting NLP and GIS platforms to integrate qualitative spatial expressions – all of which he hopes to bring into the Human Remains project. He has previously helped build corpora focused around medical consultations, Scots language change, and environmental description.
Dr Glenn Cahilly-Bretzin – Medieval Research Assistant
Glenn is the Medieval Research Assistant on the project. He draws upon his interdisciplinary training as a medievalist (BA University of Toronto; MSt and DPhil University of Oxford) to identify and analyse the project’s medieval corpus of texts, particularly examples of saints’ exhumations (known as ‘translations’). Beyond bringing his philological research as a postdoc on the Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (Oxford) and familiarity with medieval English and Latin literature, Glenn is excited to develop the Human Remains project's connection to heritage craftsmen and cathedral conservationaists.
Dr Adam Daubney - Archaeology and Heritage Research Assistant
Adam is the Archaeology and Heritage Research Assistant on the project. Adam is a finds specialist with a particular interest in the perception, treatment, and 'afterlives' of grave goods and religious objects from both consecrated and non-consecrated ground. Previous to joining the Human Remains project, Adam was the Lincolnshire Finds Liaison Officer for the British Museum's Portable Antiquities Scheme, during which time he also worked on excavations ranging from Roman coin hoards to Anglo-Saxon cemeteries.
Katherine Foster – Project Administrator
Katie is the Project Administrator on the project and is responsible for coordinating the administration, public engagement, social media and online presence of the project. Katie has a BA in English Literature and an MA in International Cultural Heritage Management with a focus on literary heritage, city culture and ethical practices and has a broad range of experience coordinating heritage projects and working with the general public.
Thomas Fitzgerald
Tom is a PhD student attached to the project, with a master’s degree in the archaeology of death and memory from the University of Chester (2020). His fellowship investigates how charnel and charnel collections were curated and encountered in postmedieval England, c.1500-c.1900AD. His broader work has explored charnelling in late medieval England and postmedieval Europe, human remains in folk and supernatural belief and practice, and how the dead and memory were curated and experienced in historic church and cathedral landscapes. Tom's publications may be found under the name Thomas J. Farrow.
You can contact the team at: remains@liverpool.ac.uk
Previous Project Team Members:
Dr Niamh Kehoe-Rouchy - Research Assistant
Niamh joined the project in December 2020 until taking up a lectureship at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany, in April 2021. Niamh graduated with a PhD in English from University College Cork in February 2019; her research focused on saints’ lives produced in England from the tenth to the thirteenth century.
Mrs. Rosie Djurovic - Project Administrator
Rosie was the Project Administrator on the Human Remains Project from November 2020 – March 2021. She has a degree in Events Management and completed her dissertation on the Sustainability of UK Business Conferences. Rosie has a broad range of experience working on projects and events in the UK and Montenegro. She now works as an Operations Coordinator for a private education company.
Dr Isabelle Gribomont
Isabelle was the Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Research Associate on the project from February 2020 to November 2021. She has a background in Latin American studies and her doctoral thesis focused on the literary dimension of the discourse issued by the Zapatista movement, a contemporary social and political movement based in Chiapas, Mexico. Her interests include corpus linguistics and Natural Language Processing methods for discourse analysis and working on contemporary Latin American social movements from a discursive perspective. She is now a mentor and collaborator with The Human Remains Project and currently works at the Automatic Language Processing Center, University of Louvain and the KBR Digital Literary Lab (Royal Library of Belgium).
Dr Rachel Swallow - Data Assistant
Rachel was the Digital Humanities Data Assistant on the project, and remains an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Archaeology, Classics & Egyptology, University of Liverpool. Rachel's innovative multi-disciplinary and cross-period research into British fortifications and their landscapes is disseminated in (inter)national peer-reviewed journals, books and conferences. Rachel has also been an Honorary Research Fellow and Guest Lecturer at the University of Chester for about 25 years, and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Project Mentors and Advisors:
The Human Remains project is also supported by an exceptional group of academic mentors and research advisors:
Professor Philip Schwyzer (English, University of Exeter)
Professor Patricia Murrieta-Flores (Digital Humanities, Lancaster University)
Dr Tom Pickles (History, University of Chester)
Dr Melanie Giles (Archaeology, University of Manchester)
Professor Sarah Tarlow (Archaeology, University of Leicester)
Professor Harold Mytum (ACE, University of Liverpool)
Dr Jessica Pearson (ACE, University of Liverpool)
Dr Kate Giles (University of York)
Dr Naomi Howell (University of Exeter)
Dr Isabelle Gribomont (Louvain University)