Present Staff
Dr Lenia Kouneni is the Director of the School of Art History’s Museums, Galleries and Collections Institute (MGCI) has a BA Hons (Archaeology and Art History) from the University of Athens, Greece, as well as an MLitt (Late Medieval and Renaissance Italian Art) from St Andrews, where she also completed her PhD in 2009. She has worked as a Neil Macgregor scholar at the National Gallery, London, doing research for the National Inventory Research Project, and has participated in a number of archaeological excavations in Greece. See Lenia’s profile here.
Bruno Brulon Soares PhD, Lecturer, joined the University of St Andrews in 2022 and is co-Director of the Museums, Galleries and Collections Institute (MGCI). He is a Museologist and Anthropologist, as well as a Professor of Museology at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) and a Professor in the Post-Graduate Program in Museology and Heritage (UNIRIO / MAST). He works closely with community-based museums and with several projects at the grassroots level involving cultural heritage and museums.
Prof Karen Brown BA MPhil PhD is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History. She is currently overseeing several research projects relating to questions of community heritage and sustainability with a particular focus on Scotland and the Global South. From 2016-2020 she is coordinating an international research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme entitled “EU-LAC-MUSEUMS: Museums and Community: Concepts, Experiences, and Sustainability in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.” See Karen’s profile here.
Nicole Meehan MA MLitt, Lecturer, joined the University of St Andrews in 2016 as an Associate Lecturer in Museum and Gallery Studies. Her research examines the role of the digital cultural object in the production of transcultural memory after the postdigital turn. Nicôle has previously worked in diverse roles across the museum sector in the UK and US. She has been Head of Education at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (University of Glasgow), managed a digitisation traineeship programme for young people at the National Galleries of Scotland and was Historic Scotland’s first Online Content Officer. During 2013-14 she was the Elsevier Fulbright Scholar in Bibliometrics which allowed her to spend a year in the US studying and finally working at the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum, Colorado. See Nicole’s profile here.
Jamie Allan Brown BA MLitt is a Research Fellow in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews. His experience includes working and supporting multi-disciplinary projects across the Global South, and his research interests include community heritage, sustainable development, and youth participation in community-based museums. He previously led the bi-regional youth exchange between Latin America and Europe for the award-winning EU-LAC Museums project (EC Horizon 2020, 2016-2021), was Co-Investigator for the Community Crafts and Culture project (GCRF, 2019-2021), Co-ordinator for heritage-based projects in Costa Rica, Peru, Tanzania and Ukraine (GCRF, 2020-2022) in the School of Geosciences and the School of Geography and Sustainable Development. Currently, he leads the research-led youth exchange between Scotland and the Caribbean for the Shared Island Stories project (ERC-selected and UKRI-funded 2022-2027).