Personal Histories at Cambridge

Meg Conkey, Ruth Tringham, Henrietta Moore, and Alison Wylie were asked to speak at Cambridge for the Personal Histories in Archaeological Theory and Method series, and happily there is video of the talk.  If you’ve never had an archaeological theory class, these women are all formative thinkers in feminist, structuralist and post-processual archaeology.  I uploaded the first part to youtube and will upload the other two parts later today, but if you are impatient for the rest, go here for the files.  I chose to go to Berkeley in part because of the presence of women in the department at all faculty levels, two of whom are speaking in this video (and, incidentally, are on my dissertation committee!).

This first segment is great–Meg Conkey and Henrietta Moore introduce themselves (they decided to go in alphabetical order, but also by height) and there’s a pan to Colin Renfrew in the audience.  I wish I could have been there, but even more I wish I could have been out to drinks with all of them afterwards!

So if you have any interest at all in feminism and archaeology, you might want to check these personal stories out.

Author: colleenmorgan

Dr. Colleen Morgan (ORCID 0000-0001-6907-5535) is the Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. She conducts research on digital media and archaeology, with a special focus on embodiment, avatars, genetics and bioarchaeology. She is interested in building archaeological narratives with emerging technology, including photography, video, mobile and locative devices. Through archaeological making she explores past lifeways and our current understanding of heritage, especially regarding issues of authority, authenticity, and identity.

4 thoughts on “Personal Histories at Cambridge”

  1. Hi Colleen,
    Have just found this post and am excited that it includes lectures from Meg Conkey, Alison Wylie and Ruth Tringham (as well as Lynn Meskell and others). These wonderful feminist archaeologists were my heroines doing my PhD some 14 years ago when there was no support for using gender theory in researching the figurines from Tell Ahmar, North Syria. My department was a bastion of male, culture-historians and the ideas of Conkey, Wylie and Tringham, Meskell were my oases in a desert of non-theoretical archaeology.
    Cheers,
    Victoria

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