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PhD and ECR Roundtable: Expanding Agency through Archives

15th April 2026 5pm BST – University of Liverpool School of Architecture, New Reilly Room

Six headshots of different women of various ethnicities.

Open Event

Participants of this roundtable will discuss the idea of ‘Expanding Agency’ through chosen items from archives, that they have studied as part of their research.

Participants

Heather Alcock

Heather Alcock is a built heritage practitioner and architectural historian with over 25 years of trans-Atlantic experience spanning project management, policy development, and academic research. Currently a PhD candidate (modifications submitted) in architectural history at the University of Liverpool, her research into historic planned worker settlements was funded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB). Alongside her doctoral research, she has served as a Tutor, Lecturer and Research Assistant within the Liverpool School of Architecture, contributing to the MA in Sustainable Heritage Management programme and the LSA Intersectional Histories Archive Project. Professionally, Alcock has held built heritage leadership roles at Port Sunlight Village Trust since 2014, where she authored the 2026–2029 Conservation Management Plan and supported the site’s application for the UK’s Tentative List for World Heritage Site inscription. Her portfolio also includes managing the built heritage aspects of large-scale adaptive reuse projects in New York, authoring heritage guidelines for the United Nations Headquarters, and a long record of public speaking engagements. Her portfolio demonstrates expertise in translating complex archival research, best practice for conservation, and built heritage policy into contributions for professional, academic and general audiences. 

Joy Burgess

Joy Burgess is a Lecturer in Landscape Studies and Postdoctoral Research Associate in the University of Liverpool School of Architecture. She is currently carrying out the postdoctoral research project Feminist Cartographies, with residencies at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, The Museum of English Rural Life, and the Landscape Institute. The project maps women’s twentieth-century landscape architectural practice and brings this research into public-facing museum and educational contexts through creative pedagogies. Her wider research focuses on women and gender in landscape architecture history, with an emphasis on questions of professionalisation, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity, drawing on feminist and social-historical approaches.

Emma Curtin

Emma Curtin researches the lives and careers of women who studied at Liverpool School of Architecture in the interwar period, revealing unrecognised contributions to twentieth century architecture. She is a senior lecturer at the school, and a registered architect; with experience across sectors including housing, education and heritage projects.

Pooja Sastry

Pooja Sastry is a final year PhD student on the Expanding Agency ERC project at University College Dublin, and she writes about 1930s bourgeois domestic spaces in Bombay and Buenos Aires. She used to work as an urban planner in India, and is an editorial board member for the Journal of Historical Geography.

Adefola Toye

Adefola Toye is an architectural historian and researcher currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Liverpool School of Architecture. She completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees in architecture at the University of Lagos. Her PhD research, in collaboration with The National Archives, Kew, explores the intersections of university architecture and nation-building in mid-twentieth century West Africa. Some of her works have been published in the Docomomo Journal, The Conversation UK and Archnet. Adefola was a recipient of the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference Fellowship in 2024, and a finalist at the University of Liverpool’s 3-Minutes Thesis Competition in 2025.

Kati Wolff

Kati Wolff is a Finnish–Luxembourgish landscape architect with a Master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Technology in Helsinki. Since 2024, after more than 20 years in teaching and practice, she has been a doctoral researcher at Aalto University’s School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, examining the work of Katri Luostarinen (1915–1991), one of the post-war women pioneers in Finnish landscape architecture. The archive- and oral-history-based research continues the work begun in 2010, when she located, catalogued, and transferred Luostarinen’s drawings to the Museum of Finnish Architecture, and later catalogued her personal library.

https://www.katiwolfflandscape.com/blog/
https://research.aalto.fi/en/persons/kati-wolff-susi/