Dr Ceri Pitches
- Position: Postdoctoral Research Assistant to the Professoriate
- Email: C.L.Pitches@leeds.ac.uk
- Phone: +44(0)113 343 1038
- Location: 1.09 stage@leeds
Profile
I have a varied career background as an HE Research and Impact Manager, an impact specialist in the Faculty of AHC at the University of Leeds where I supported the development of impact case studies for REF2021, a learning manager for the National Science and Media Museum, and a secondary school Drama and English teacher and Head of Department.
I work closely with senior academics in the School supporting their diverse and ongoing research needs relating to projects, publications, funding applications and research events. My own emergent research is around creative walking methodologies.
As Director of Impact I lead the School’s strategy for research impact, supporting colleagues to maximise the benefits of their research and preparing for REF2028.
My PhD was fully funded by the AHRC through its Collaborative Doctoral Award scheme and undertaken in partnership with the National Science and Media Museum. My thesis focused on the UK Science Museum Group ‘Explainer’ role, arguing for new recognition of its performative complexity, and positioning it as the latest iteration in a performed science communication tradition that I trace first, to the practices of the Science Museum Guide Lecturers starting in 1924, and then further back to nineteenth-century lecture demonstration practices at the Royal Institution, London. In so doing, my research re-evaluates the ‘Explainer’ role, challenging commonly held museum industry assumptions that the current iteration is simply a late twentieth-century customer service and education construct and proposing a new history of its development and practice. My associated article, Threading Through History was published in the Science Museum Group Journal.
My chapter reflecting on my own training with theatre maker Clive Barker is published in the Methuen edited collection Clive Barker and his Legacy (Fryer, P. & Jones, N. eds. 2022).
Responsibilities
- Director of Impact
Qualifications
- PhD Performance Studies, Museum Studies, Historiography
- PGCE Drama in Education with English
- BA Theatre Studies and Dramatic Art