Public History and Community Heritage

Public History looks beyond the university to include ‘people as well as nations and communities in the creation of their own history’ (Kean, 2013).

The Centre for History intertwines this approach with Community Heritage, building from our thinking around ‘Heritage from Below’ and broader research, teaching and knowledge exchange in Critical Heritage Studies. At the heart of this theme is a focus on the multiple communities, human and non-human, with whom we interact.

Research in this thematic area spans varied interests and expertise, including: combining community-led public archaeology with archival research and training; critically exploring the nature and history of Scotland in the context of links to empire and ongoing legacies of slavery; engaging with contemporary manifestations of medievalism, including through the medium of the graphic novel; and we often incorporate oral history methodologies as we seek to think critically about the role of the past in the present. Drawing all this together is a shared commitment to thinking about community and identity in a place-based context and to the principals of community-focused, collaborative and co-produced research.

Thus, the heritage and public history work we do is largely for and from local communities – at various spatial scales – with a view to critiquing and reworking authorised heritage discourses and the imposition of top-down public history.

Kean, H. Public History Reader (Routledge, 2013)

Three people gathered around of a screen on a ground penetrating radar scanner. In the background there are stone buildings and leafy trees.

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) scanning in 2025 as part of the Perth Charterhouse Project.

Staff

Dr Alison Chand is an oral historian whose research currently focuses on the experiences of different British population groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her previous research has studied men who worked in reserved occupations in Britain during the Second World War.
Dr Lucy Dean is a late medieval and early modern historian who works on Scotland and Europe with a keen interest in ceremony and ritual, monarchy and kingship, gender and masculinity, coming of age and the life cycle, material culture and public history.
Dr Juliette Desportes' research focuses on the ways Highland land has been managed, transformed, and contested across the long eighteenth-century.
Dr Linsey Hunter (teaching-focused) has diverse research interests spanning medieval to modern. She is currently researching politics, emotions, law and gender in late medieval Scottish chronicle narratives and the lives and afterlives of the tenth-century figure, Finella, Lady of the Mearns, a project which encompasses local and place-based history and medievalisms.
Dr Iain MacInnes is a medieval historian, whose research focusses on Scottish political and military history.
Dr Jim MacPherson collaborative cultural historian of modern Britain whose research focuses on empire, diaspora, migration, decolonization and the continuing legacies of colonialism in the Scottish Highlands.
Dr Nicola Martin a transatlantic military historian, specialising in eighteenth-century British imperialism (primarily in Scotland and North America) and Jacobitism.
Dr Iain Robertson is Associate Professor of Historical Geography with research interests in the intersections of land, people and memory in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. In the field of critical heritage studies he has developed the concept and category Heritage From Below and works collaboratively with community groups across the region to help engender counter-hegemonic senses of the past in the present.

PG Researchers

Greg Cotton, 'Oh my land, My faraway place': The near past, distant homelands and the performance of Irish and Portuguese nationhoods in the Eurovision Song Contest 1969 – 2022
Jo MacDonald, The Past, Present and Future of a Community-Owned Estate: Building Resilient “Future Heritage” in West Harris
Melanie Manwaring-McKay, Understanding the Spheres of Discourse and Epistemes of a Victorian Highland Gentleman Through an Analysis of the Maps in the Fraser-Mackintosh (1828-1901) Library and Archival Collection
Dave McBain, Diversify to survive, or self-betterment? Can scant historic records and archaeological evidence be used to trace population and employment changes in Lochinver 1774-1891?

Current Research Projects

Beyond the Rainbow: An Oral History of Teenagers and Young Adults in Scotland during the Covid-19 Pandemic, led by Dr Alison Chand, will involve undertaking oral history interviews to develop an understanding of how teenagers and young adults navigated the period from March 2020 to early 2022, including changes to their education and social lives and the effects of the period on their health

Resources and Collaborations

Centre for Histories of People, Place and Community (CHPPC) at the Institute of Historical Research
- The Centre for History has collaborated closely with the CHPPC since 2023, researching ‘public history’ in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and the extent to which it is distinctive and particular to this region.