Marianne Hem Eriksen

I took up the post of Associate Professor of Archaeology in Leicester in early 2021 and I will until 2026 principally focus on the ERC Starting Grant Body-Politics: Death Personhood and Sexuality in the Iron and Viking Ages. Before taking up the post in Leicester I was Associate Professor of Archaeology at the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. From 2017-2019 a grant took me to the University of Cambridge where I was a Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute of Archaeology and at Clare Hall college. Before this I was substitute Associate Professor (2016) and Teaching Fellow (2015) at the Institute for Archaeology in Oslo. My PhD (2012-2015) was also written there, with some time spent at UCL.

My research ranges topics from infancy, power and the powerless, to movement, dreams and the self in the past. It centres around three main axes of late prehistoric and early medieval Scandinavia: the entwinement between architecture and inhabitants; the complex relationships between the living and the dead; and politics of the body. Often, I have worked with the links between architectural spaces and human bodies, by considering how prehistoric houses are built by bodies, produce certain bodily experiences, can be conceptualised as bodies themselves - and how dead bodies, parts and whole, are linked to domestic space. I have a strong interest in the lived experiences of inequality and gender.

I was honoured to receive the 2022 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Archaeology.