Dr Alyssa Grossman PhD

Personal Statement

As a social and visual anthropologist, my work spans the themes of cultural memory, critical heritage, material and visual culture, ethnographic filmmaking, and the intersections between anthropology and contemporary art. My fieldwork primarily has been in Romania, investigating sites and practices of remembrance work in post-communist Bucharest, with a focus on everyday objects, landscapes, images and discourses of memorialisation. My ethnographic films include Into the Field (2005), In the Light of Memory (2010), and Memory Objects, Memory Dialogues (2011, co-directed with Selena Kimball). I have also conducted fieldwork in ethnographic museums and archives, and I have done research on amateur film practices and family archives.

Drawn to cross-disciplinary and exploratory methodologies, I co-founded the collective General Assn. with visual artist Selena Kimball. Our long-term art/anthropology collaborations and exchanges include exhibitions, film and video installations, collaborative fieldwork, and written texts. Our current project, 'Catalogue of Correspondence: Based on a Collection of Rocks at the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture Archives', involves experimental, decolonising approaches to engaging with anthropological museums and archives, proposing new forms and formulations of the ethnographic catalogue through affective, subjective and exploratory modes of artefact interpretation and categorisation.

I have an MA in Visual Anthropology from the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (2005), and a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media from the University of Manchester (2010). After completing post-doctoral research at the University of Gothenburg’s Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (2016), I held a post-doc in Artistic Research at the University of Gothenburg’s Valand Academy (now HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design), where I maintain an affiliation as Docent/Associate Professor in Fine Art. I joined the University of Liverpool in 2019 as a Lecturer in Communication and Media, and I am part of the Culture, Space and Memory research cluster, and a founding member of the Centre for Culture and Everyday Life. Since 2022, I have been co-editor in chief of the Journal of Anthropological Films.