CERI ASHLEY

Ceri joined the British Museum in 2018 to take up the position of Head of EMKP and help launch the programme. She is responsible for leading EMKP on a day-to-day basis. Ceri’s background is in the archaeology of Holocene eastern and southern Africa, with a focus on material culture, particularly ceramics. She has led research in Kenya, Uganda, Botswana and South Africa, and on topics as diverse as hunter-gatherer ceramics in the Great Lakes region, the material impact of nineteenth-century missionaries in Botswana, and the political economy of state formation in southern Africa. In 2021 Ceri was appointed to a 0.2 position as Professor of Cultural Heritage at Nottingham Trent University.

Prior to joining EMKP, Ceri was an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and has held previous positions at UCL and UCLA. Ceri is a member of Council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and member of the AHRC Peer Review College. She is actively involved in various research projects including current work on the collections and archive of H J Braunholtz, a former Keeper of Ethnography at the British Museum, and is a research partner on the GCRF Network+ grant ‘Imagining Futures through Un/archived Pasts’.