Dr Angela Stienne

I am a museum researcher writer and producer creating physical and digital spaces to share and challenge narratives around material culture bodies ethics and inclusion in museums. I am the founder of three internationally-acclaimed projects: Mummy Stories The Lyme Museum and a Leicester-based museum relabeling by refugees and asylum seekers.. My background is as a museologist and a cultural historian interested in cultures of collecting of human remains with a particular focus on Egyptian mummies. I am particularly interested in engagements with the public on questions of ethics removal representation and restitution. As the founder of The Lyme Museum and an inclusion consultant I am interested in ways to make cultural institutions more accessible to disabled and chronically ill individuals and the representation of disability and illness in medical museums. 

I work as a museum consultant on topics related to ethics inclusion representation and the body. I have worked with the following institutions: Wellcome Collection The Pitt Rivers Museum Manchester Museum the University of Leicester Leicester Museum & Art Gallery and National Trust. I was a Medicine Galleries Research Fellow at the Science Museum in 2019 looking at the translocation of human remains from the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum to the Science Museum. As part of my Medicine Galleries Research Fellowship I developed public engagement events at the World Museum in Liverpool Leicester Museum & Art Gallery and I organized and facilitated the first symposium on human remains at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester with support from the Science Museum and the Wellcome Trust.

My first book, Mummified, The Stories behind Egyptian mummies in museums, is out June 2022 with Manchester University Press.

Other public and academic publications include:

Stienne, A. 2019 To turn round a dead: Engagements with Egyptian mummies in London at the turn of the nineteenth century, Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, 28(1), pp.1-28.

Stienne, A. 2019 What next for human remains collections at the World Museum Liverpool, Liverpool Museums Blog (https://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2019/06/what-next-for-human-remains-collections-at-the-world-museum/)

Stienne, A. 2018 Curating Heads at UCL: Rethinking human remains in museum collections, Museum Worlds.

Stienne, A. 2016 The Egyptian mummy in UK museums: Cultural histories and object biographies, Techne 44, pp.40-44.

I do not supervise students but I can be contacted for informal mentoring of PhD students.

I guest lecture internationally on access in museums the ethics of human remains communication and public engagement/ co-production in museums.

Human remains in museums; Egyptology; ethics; medical collections; accessibility and disability representation; French museums especially archaeological and ethnographic collections.

I am the 2019 winner of the Future Leader Award at the University of Leicester and a twice-nominee for the Diversability Award.

24 October 2019 'Situated Bodies: Human remains from the Wellcome Collection at the Science Museum' Research Seminars Science Museum London 30 September 2019 'Contested Bodies: Egyptian Mummies in the 21st century museum' Guest speaker Human Remains. Ethics Conservation Display Museo Egizio Turin 19 September 2019 Human remains in the 21st century museum Organizer and speaker Science Museum and School of Museum Studies University of Leicester Leicester 23 June 2019 'Egyptian Mummies as displaced people' Workshop leader (public talks workshops and relabeling) Refugee Week New Walk Museum Leicester 29 March 2019 ‘Encounters with Egyptian mummies at the Louvre’ Friends of the Petrie Museum Lecture Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology London September 2018 ‘The Musée de l’Homme has lost touch with its history: rewriting colonial history in Paris’ Museums (em)Power School of Museum Studies University of Leicester July 2018 ‘The Controversial Mummy’ British Museum Egyptological Colloquium British Museum London

PhD Museum Studies School of Museum Studies University of Leicester (2018) MA Museum Studies School of Museum Studies University of Leicester (2015) BA Ancient History & Egyptology University College London (2013)