Anna Reeve

Anna Reeve is a material culture historian whose scholarly work focuses on the history of Cypriot archaeology, collecting and display in the UK.

Her doctoral thesis explored the ancient Cypriot collection in Leeds Museums and Galleries, restoring its cultural and historical context and examining the development of practices of collecting and interpreting ancient Cypriot material culture over the period 1870 to 1947.  She is currently working on a corpus of the Leeds ancient Cypriot collection based on her doctoral research.

Other current projects include Exploring ancient Cyprus at CultureNL Museums, funded by a grant from the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and Ancient designs, modern wares: Cypriot antiquities in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, funded by the Association for Art History.

She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Empire and excavation: critical perspectives on archaeology in British-period Cyprus, 1878-1960, arising from a series of online events hosted by the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute and the British Museum.  She is also co-chair of the Classical Collections Network, a Subject Specialist Network for academics and museum professionals working with Classical collections in the UK.

With a background in Classics and English Literature, she is an Associate Fellow of the HEA and teaches Classics as an Associate Lecturer at the Open University.  She is an Associate of the Museums Association (AMA), and works closely with museum partners in exploring the potential of their ancient Cypriot collections. Her research blog can be found at cypriotartleeds.wordpress.com

In 2022 she has been awarded a Brotherton Fellowship to carry out the project Ways of seeing the ancient world: Irene Manton’s collection of antiquities, working with the Manton papers in Leeds University Library Special Collections and the Irene Manton Collection at the Peter Scott Gallery in Lancaster.

Publications

Forthcoming. ‘Figures in a landscape: the Leeds Museums and Galleries collection of ancient Cypriot figurines’. In: Schmidt, S., et al, eds. Proceedings of the Postgraduate Conference in Cypriot Archaeology held at Berlin, Humboldt-University, 13-15 July 2019. Berlin: Studia Cyprologica Berolinensia.

2021 (with Dr Sally Waite). ‘Re-collecting Cypriot antiquity: The Kent collection in Harrogate’. Journal of the History of Collections, 33(2), pp. 359–372. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhaa020

2020. ‘Review: St. Boys Smith, Thomas Sandwith. A British Consul in the Levant 1855-1891’. Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes, 50, pp. 591-592.

2020. ‘The Archaeological Activities of the Scott-Stevensons in Cyprus, 1878-1883’. Bulletin of the History of Archaeology. 30(1) (online). http://doi.org/10.5334/bha-629

2020. ‘Following Object Itineraries: Recontextualising Antiquities from Classical Cyprus’. In: Koiner, G., et al. eds. Classical Cyprus. Proceedings of the Conference. University of Graz, 21-23 September 2017. Graz: Verlag Holzhausen GmbH, pp. 109-123.

2016. ‘T.B. Sandwith and the Leeds City Museum's Ancient Cypriot Collection’. In: Maguire, R. and Chick, J. eds. Approaching Cyprus. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 277-290.