DPhil Student
Wolfson College
Thesis (working title): The Social Life of the Memorial Bench
Research summary:
Anna Malpas is a DPhil candidate working at the intersection of grief, material culture, memory, and landscape. Alongside her academic research, she brings extensive professional experience from heritage consultancy, and international contexts, particularly Japan.
Her doctoral research examines memorial benches as material, social, and affective sites within the contemporary British landscape. The project explores how memorial benches operate as loci of personhood, memory, and social encounter, tracing their social lives across design, installation, use, decay, and regulation.
Through ethnographic fieldwork across the United Kingdom, she works with four key groups: those who commission memorial benches, individuals who engage with them through memorial practice, people who actively search for them, and those who encounter them unexpectedly. Combining participant observation, interviews, archival research, and visual methods, the research contributes to anthropological debates on death and memorialisation, materiality, landscape, and memory, while offering insights relevant to local authorities and heritage organisations.
Profile
Anna lived, studied, and worked in Japan for many years, completing her undergraduate degree at Doshisha University in Kyoto and subsequently working across education, research, and cultural sectors. This long-term engagement with Japan has shaped her anthropological interests in museums, interpretive practice, heritage-making, and cross-cultural approaches to memory and public space. Her early research examined museum interpretation at Kyoto National Museum, and she has continued to work with Japanese cultural and heritage organisations in both academic and professional capacities.
Alongside her academic training, Anna is a partner at a heritage and culture consultancy based in the United Kingdom. In this role, she has worked with museums, heritage sites, local authorities, and cultural organisations in the UK and Japan on visitor research, interpretive strategy development, audience engagement, and policy advising. This professional work continues to inform her anthropological approach to public-facing heritage, governance, and institutional practice.
Her current doctoral research builds on this combined academic and professional background. Through ethnographic, visual, and multimodal methods, she examines memorial benches as socially and materially complex sites of memory, grief, and encounter in the British landscape. Her work reflects a broader commitment to anthropological research that is methodologically experimental, attentive to everyday material forms, and engaged with questions that matter beyond the academy.
Research interests
- Death, grief, and memorialisation
- Material culture and landscape
- Memory and personhood
- Visual, sensory, and multimodal methods
- Museums, heritage, and public space
- British ethnography
Academic Activities
- Book Reviews Editor, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO)
Awards and funding
- Oxford-Wolfson Marriot Graduate Scholarship and Stipend (2025)
- Lincoln College Examination Prize (2025)
- Lincoln College Graduate Research Fund Grant (2024)
- SAME Travel Award and SAME Conference Award (2024, 2025)
- Ishibashi Foundation Fellowship (2019)
- Doshisha University Award and Scholarship for Academic Excellence (2018)
Education
- University of Oxford – MPhil in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology (Distinction)
- Doshisha University – BA (Hons) (Valedictorian)
Contact
Email: anna.malpas@anthro.ox.ac.uk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-malpas-ba7ab487/
