Military Surplus: Toxicity, Industry and War

• • Paola Filippucci (Senior College Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology)
  • Zsuzsanna Ihar (PhD candidate and Gates Scholar, Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
  • Layla Renshaw (Honorary Research Associate, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Associate Professor Forensic Science, Department of Applied and Human Sciences, Kingston University)
  • External: Jo Sweeney (Education and Outreach Officer Gunpowder Mills, Independent Scholar)

About the convenors

Dr Paola Filippucci is a Senior College Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Murray Edwards College and an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She has carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the former battlefields of the Western Front (France/Belgium), focusing on the socio-cultural and landscape impacts of war destruction and reconstruction in these regions. She has published several articles and book chapters on this theme. She is a member of the steering committee of the Heritage Research Centre at Cambridge, which regularly organises workshops and conferences at the McDonald Institute (Department of Archaeology).

Zsuzsanna Ihar is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She has conducted fieldwork in garrison towns, disused army bases, reclaimed conservation areas, and former military trial sites. Her doctoral research, in part, explores the ongoing militarisation of Scotland’s West Highlands and Hebridean archipelago, with a specific interest in local knowledge-making practices and the mobilisation of scientific expertise within military projects. She is a Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) research fellow and a member of the Wellcome Trust-funded project, From Collection to Cultivation (led by Professor Helen Anne Curry). She was formerly a Knowledge Management fellow at ICARDA and convened the Feminist HPS reading group at Cambridge. Zsuzsanna is also an avid documentary photographer and filmmaker.

Dr Layla Renshaw is an Honorary Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and an Associate Professor of Forensic Science at the Department of Applied and Human Sciences at Kingston University. Her research focuses on post-conflict investigations, and the relationship between human remains, material culture and traumatic memory. She has worked for the International Criminal Tribunal in Kosovo and investigated WWI and WWII conflict sites in Europe. Layla has carried out fieldwork at multiple sites in Spain and is the author of ‘Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War’. In 2019, she was principal investigator on the ISRF-funded group project ‘Citizen Forensics: Materializing the Dead from Grave to Gene’. Layla is currently co-investigator on Dr Esther Breithoff’s UKRI project ‘Ecologies of Violence’.

Josephine Sweeney is currently the Learning and Engagement Officer at Leighton House, a historic house museum in Kensington, London. She previously worked at the Royal Gunpowder Mills, an industrial Heritage site in Waltham Abbey, Essex. She has a longstanding interest in collaborating with schools, families, and community groups to expand access and critically engage audiences with these heritage sites through practical, hands-on activities. Her MA dissertation ‘Approaching Asbestos as Heritage’ – exploring the legacies of asbestos – was awarded The Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology Postgraduate Dissertation Prize 2021. As an independent heritage scholar, she continues to research asbestos and its afterlives, considering how the mineral’s properties might challenge notions of ‘aftermath’, and instead pull attention to the ongoing, shifting, compounded, sudden and slow repercussions of conflict and military material residues.

Faculty advisors