Associates

Associates are members of the Centre who support its activities voluntarily through their own initiatives. This may include collaborating on research projects, giving a lecture or supporting an event, facilitating connections and networking with industry or community partners, helping with the Centre’s communications or engagement activities, and so much more. 

Nina Parish is Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on memory, multilingualism and the representation of difficult histories, particularly in museum contexts. She also works on text-image interaction in modern and contemporary French studies, with a particular interest in the work of Henri Michaux.

Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling, with research expertise in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He is known for his work on 4E cognition—embodied, embedded, extended and enactive approaches to the mind—and the role of technology in shaping psychological performance. His current research explores connections between 4E cognitive science and the creative arts.

Rachael Elward is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist with expertise in memory disorders and their neural basis. She is Course Director of the BSc Psychology programme at London South Bank University, where she also co-leads the Brain, Mind and Behaviour Research Group. Her research focuses on memory development and impairment, particularly in individuals with developmental amnesia.

Joseph Smith is a senior lecturer in education with expertise in the school history curriculum and its enactment by history teachers. He is interested in the ways that the school history curriculum is constructed: whose voices are heard, the framings that are adopted and the ontological and epistemological assumptions which underlie these.

Ten-Herng Lai is a political philosopher and academic migrant whose research focuses on illegal activism, including civil and uncivil disobedience, and the commemoration of political dissent. He also works on democracy, hate speech, the political philosophy of language, and applied ethics.

Jennie Morgan is a senior lecturer in heritage at the University of Stirling, with a background in social anthropology and museum curation. Her research uses ethnographic methods to explore socially engaged museum practice, including recent work on curating profusion and the emotional dimensions of heritage work. She has collaborated with a wide range of cultural heritage organisations in the UK and internationally.

Richard Haynes is Professor of Media Sport at the University of Stirling, with long-standing research interests in the relationship between sport, media and popular culture. His recent work focuses on sporting heritage, including intergenerational memory, community archives, and digital engagement with sport collections. He is currently involved in a fan-led project commemorating the early life of Scotland international Billy Bremner.

Donna Rose Addis is Canada 150 Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. Her research combines neuroimaging, behavioural and neuropsychological methods to study how we remember the past, imagine the future, and construct a sense of self. She is particularly interested in how these processes are affected by age, mood, and memory loss. Her work has yielded new theoretical and philosophical perspectives, including the reconceptualization of memory as future-oriented.

Christine Harris-Smyth is a retired communications and project management professional with over 30 years’ experience across the arts, media, technology, and public sectors. She has worked internationally in senior communications roles, with a focus on strategy, governance and sector development, her career spanned arts administration, law, government, and internet startups. Now based in Scotland and Australia, she volunteers in cultural and research settings.

Melanie Lovatt is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Stirling, with expertise in time and temporality, ageing, the life course, and intergenerational relationships. She is a qualitative researcher with a particular interest in creative and artistic methods. Her current work explores intergenerational relationships in places experiencing abandonment and renewal.

Kim McKee is a Professor of Housing & Social Policy at the University of Stirling.  She is an international expert in housing inequalities, precarity and governance.  Her research explores the emotional dimensions of housing systems and their relations of power, with a strong focus on lived experience. It seeks to inform policy and professional practice, but is also grounded in critical theory.

Maike Dinger is a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC/DFG project VOICES from the Periphery, with Bournemouth University, the University of Greifswald (Germany) and the University of Stirling. Her research examines national politics, media representations, identity discourse and cultural memory in Scotland and the UK. With Dr Coree Brown Swan she holds Centre Seed Funding for Unfinished Business, mapping traces of the Scottish independence referendum and how memory, place and political mobilisation intersect in public space.

Judith Phillips is Professor of Social and Environmental Gerontology in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling. A former Deputy Principal (Research, 2016–2024), she also served as Research Director for UKRI’s Healthy Ageing Challenge (2020–2024). Her work focuses on the environmental, social and interdisciplinary dimensions of ageing, and she advises regularly at UK, EU and global levels.

Richard Ward is Professor of Dementia, Ageing and Community at the University of Stirling and a registered social worker. His research centres on dementia and place, focusing on how people with dementia experience their local communities. He collaborates with colleagues in Canada and Germany to examine the social, temporal and spatial dimensions of place. He is co-founder of the Critical Dementia Studies Network, which applies critical social theory to dementia, and co-commissioning editor of the Routledge series Dementia in Critical Dialogue.

Vanicka Arora is Lecturer in Heritage History, Heritage and Politics at the University of Stirling. Her teaching spans undergraduate and postgraduate heritage programmes, focusing on globalisation, postcolonialism and managing change in the Anthropocene. Her research explores the temporalities of disasters and long recoveries, how intersecting crises shape heritage and collective memory, the implications of generative AI for archives and memory, and intergenerational practices of care and repair. Trained as an architect, she has over a decade of professional experience in India in disaster risk reduction for heritage sites, conservation and adaptive reuse, and urban regeneration.

Celia Harris is Associate Professor at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University. A cognitive scientist of human memory, she focuses on autobiographical memory and how retrieval is supported by the environment—through tools, technologies and social interaction. Her work aims to translate theory into practical supports that make remembering easier, particularly for those who most benefit, and to foster connection and wellbeing in later life.

Fiona Barclay is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Stirling. Her research examines cultural memory of the French empire in Algeria and how the colonial and post-independence periods are remembered in conflicting ways by disparate groups. Her work explores how literature, film and other cultural forms construct narratives that both reaffirm and unsettle settler-colonial positionalities. She is interested in the interface between cognitive neuroscience and artistic/cultural memory in the construction of place and subjectivity.

Jeffrey Olick is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia. A cultural and historical sociologist, he works on collective memory and commemoration, critical theory, transitional justice, post-war Germany and sociological theory. He is a past President of the Memory Studies Association and an elected member of the Sociological Research Association. Current projects include the history of the boundary between psychology and sociology, a study of Maurice Halbwachs, and how political cultures change through conflicts over memory.

Brady Wagoner is Professor of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University, Denmark. His research develops a dynamic cultural-psychological approach to memory as a dialogical, constructive phenomenon, with studies of conversational remembering, historical narratives, memorial sites and historical analogies. His books include The Constructive Mind: Bartlett’s Psychology in Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and the Handbook of Culture and Memory (Oxford University Press, 2018). In 2021 he received the Humboldt Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Siân Jones is Professor of Heritage at the University of Stirling. An interdisciplinary scholar in archaeology, history and social anthropology, she focuses on heritage, museums, memory and material culture. Her research addresses heritage, identity and the modern nation-state; the politics of monuments and memory; place-making, displacement and belonging; and the cultural biographies of objects, monuments and landscapes. A significant strand in her work focuses on place-making, combining archaeological, historical and ethnographic research to explore how people sustain relationships with place, through time.

Coree Brown Swan is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Stirling and a political scientist specialising in devolution, nationalism and territorial politics in the UK and beyond. Her research examines intergovernmental relations, constitutional change and the narratives that shape political debate. She teaches comparative politics, Scottish politics and research methods, bringing decolonial perspectives and innovative methodologies into the classroom.

Catherine Hennessy is Professor of Ageing at the University of Stirling. Her research examines how organisational, sociocultural and geographic contexts of ageing and care shape older people’s health and social inclusion. Recent work focuses on the use of digital technologies in health promotion with older adults, and on how place can activate memory and enhance wellbeing through intergenerational sport reminiscence.

Eileen Tisdall is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography at the University of Stirling. Trained as a geologist, she actively promotes the application of palaeoenvironmental techniques to landscape conservation, addressing biodiversity and habitat change in response to human activity and climate change. Her current research also explores novel applications of these techniques, including the identification of pollen and other organic remains on medieval manuscripts.

Lucas B. Mazur is a social and cultural psychologist, University Professor and Director of English-language Psychology programmes at the Sigmund Freud University (Berlin, Germany) and Professor at the Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland). He researches the psychosocial processes underlying assessments of violence and how these processes are interwoven with the placement of that violence within geopolitical space. How, when, and why do we discuss the location of violence and what are the consequences of doing so for memory and commemoration?

Richard Batty is Lecturer in Psychology at London South Bank University and a practitioner with a background in theatre, wellbeing and community outreach. His work centres on supporting marginalised individuals and families facing social exclusion and complex circumstances. He uses creative, arts-based and qualitative methods—including digital storytelling, participatory mapping, photography, creative writing and music—to examine connection, identity and belonging. Grounded in lived experience, his research explores the emotional and relational geographies of young people, particularly those in the youth justice system, and aims to amplify under-represented voices to inform inclusive practice and policy.

Lesley Palmer is Professor of Ageing and Dementia Design within the Centre for Environments, Dementia and Ageing at the University of Stirling. and a UK-based architect. Her career spans practice, teaching, knowledge exchange and research. Palmer’s field of research and expertise is in the design of the built environment for ageing and dementia. This is a niche area of environmental design which includes research into building performance, sensing technologies, virtual and augmented reality, dementia design of products, architecture, and urban design. Her interests also extend to housing policy and investigating future models of sustainable housing design, procurement, and construction with an intergenerational focus.

Sally Foster is Professor in Heritage and Conservation at the University of  Stirling. Her research focuses on how meaning and values emerge from the intersection of people, places and things. My Life as a Replica: St John’s Cross, Iona was published with Siân Jones in 2020 and led to the co-production of the cross-sectoral New Futures for Replicas: Principles and Guidance for Museums and Heritage . Her research around the Stone of Destiny/Scone has discovered an extremely rich and memorable case study for navigating the relationship between remembering, imagining and testimony, and how authenticity works in the case of a much-contested icon.

Marco Bernini is Associate Professor in Cognitive Literary Studies at Durham University. His research connects narrative theory and cognitive science, with work on the extended mind, immersion and fictive “emersivity”, introspection, mental imagery, mind wandering, inner speech, moods, analogy-making, emergence, hypnagogia and dream states. He is the author of Beckett and the Cognitive Method: Mind, Models and Exploratory Narratives (2021) and co-editor of Dreams, Narrative, and Liminal Cognition (2026). He founded and directs the Narrative and Cognition Lab.

Hugo Spiers is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. He studies how the brain recalls the past, navigates the present and imagines the future, and has published over 100 articles across neuroscience and psychology. He is co-director of the Centre for NeuroArchitecture and NeuroDesign, a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation, and Vice Chair of the UK Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture. His project Sea Hero Quest tested more than four million people worldwide, providing new insights into navigation and Alzheimer’s disease.

Carl F. Craver is a philosopher of science whose early work advanced mechanistic explanation in the neurosciences, arguing for multi-level accounts of how brains support behaviour. His book Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience (2007) is a key reference in this area. More recently, his work with neuropsychology examines how forms of amnesia shape a person’s experience of time, moral reasoning and selfhood, developed in his book with Shayna Rosenbaum, Living without Memory.

Takuya Niikawa is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kobe University and a member of the Kobe Institute for Atmospheric Studies. His work centres on analytic philosophy of mind, especially the value of conscious experience and the nature of atmosphere. He also pursues experimental phenomenology in collaboration with psychologists and neuroscientists. As part of his “Narrative Consciousness” project, he has recently explored caregiving experiences, particularly in dementia care.

Tim Edensor is Emeritus Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002), Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), From Light to Dark (2017), Stone: Stories of Urban Materiality (2020) and Landscape, Materiality and Heritage (2022). His research ranges across heritage, temporality and the imbrication of past and present in suburban walls, urban squares, sacred wells, roadscapes, commemorative sites, derelict spaces and arboreal environments.

Francesco Garbelli is a PhD researcher in cognitive semiotics at the University of Milan and the University of Bologna. His project examines how memory and imagination shape the meaning of perception within ecological and 4E approaches to cognition. He works interdisciplinarily across semiotics, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy and literature. His aim is to clarify how basic sense-making emerges as experience is interpreted through memory and as memories are reshaped by new experience.

Emma Waterton is a Leverhulme International Professor at the University of York, where she directs the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre. She is also Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University and Honorary Professor at Aarhus University. Her research examines heritage, identity, memory and affect, anti-colonial politics, migrant heritage-making, and climate justice in the Anthropocene.

Tracy Ireland is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Heritage at the University of Canberra. An archaeologist, cultural sector leader and community-engaged heritage practitioner, she is known for research on heritage ethics and values that has shaped practice and policy in Australia and internationally. She leads the Australian Research Council projects Heritage of the Air, Everyday Heritage and Nuclear Nation. She is the immediate past President of Australia ICOMOS, Editor of Historic Environment, Honorary Fellow in Archaeology at the University of York, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Alexa Morcom is Associate Professor in Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. Her group studies human memory and how it changes with ageing, using fMRI, EEG and behavioural methods to examine memory in action. She previously worked at UCL, Cambridge and Edinburgh, and her research spans multivariate brain imaging, ageing and the neural mechanisms supporting episodic remembering.

Aramiha Harwood is a Māori Ngāpuhi writer, researcher and game designer who grew up in regional Victoria. He publishes tabletop games through Mana Press, drawing on Indigenous concepts of mana and narrative storytelling. His research spans identity, agency, cultural precincts, international education, Māori diaspora and the role of place and gaming in Indigenous knowledge. He is a Research Fellow in the Play About Place project within RMIT’s Future Play Lab.

Danielle Wyatt is a cultural researcher at the University of Melbourne whose work sits at the intersection of art, urbanism and public culture. She has written on arts and cultural precincts, public and community art, digital public libraries and settler-colonial placemaking. Her current work focuses on how playing communities create place and identity in the city, and on how resilience discourse is reshaping creative and institutional practices.

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