Profile
Dr Amara Thornton is a historian of archaeology with a research focus on archaeological collections histories in museums, social history and networks in archaeology, archives of archaeology, and popular publishing in archaeology, particularly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Amara was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded “Beyond Notability” project (2021-24) and also led the “Animating Caribbean Collections at the British Museum” knowledge exchange project (2023). Amara's co-edited anthology with Dr Katy Soar, Strange Relics: Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural was published by Handheld Press in 2022.
Before coming to the ICS, Amara was Research Officer leading Narrating the Diverse Past, a joint University of Reading/British Museum partnership project (2020-2021), and prior to that Research Officer at the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading (2019-2020). In 2018, she obtained a CBRL Centenary award to produce www.petra1929.co.uk. Between 2013 and 2016 Amara held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, during which she researched and wrote her first book Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People (UCL Press, 2018). In 2010 she founded the History of Archaeology Network at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, where she obtained her PhD in 2011. She has led Filming Antiquity, a digitisation and research project on historic excavation footage, since 2014.