About Val Williamson, PhD

Val Williamson has an honours degree in English with linguistics from the University of Lancaster, and a PhD in cultural studies from Liverpool John Moores University. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Dr. Williamson has a Certificate of Education in primary education, and for fourteen years taught science and math, among other subjects. In 1996 she gained first class Honours in English with linguistics from the University of Lancaster, followed in 2003 with the award of a PhD in cultural studies from Liverpool John Moores University. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Until retirement in 2008, Val taught cultural topics to university students from early undergraduate to PhD level, specialising in cultural research methods. She researches the role of traditional mythic narratives in contemporary culture, and the cultural practices of writers, readers and audiences, where her primary research method is ethnography.

Dr. Williamson has presented many research papers, contributed to academic journals, and contributed chapters published in several academic books. She contributed to two major externally funded research projects, a research resource at the MEDAL Project at the Faculty of Health, Community and Education Studies University of Northumbria, and a paper at the Arts & Humanities Council supported international conference on Contemporary Cultures of Reading at the University of Birmingham.

Val developed an early interest in archaeology through living in places where historical artefacts emerge from the ground on a regular basis. As a teen she encountered famous archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler at a school event and became intrigued by how archaeology is interpreted, or decoded. She lived in an English village where an archaeological survey revealed relics of previous inhabitants from several millennia, including the Normans, Anglo-Saxons, Romans and the Bronze Age. Such relics can show how people in the past behaved by drawing on science, engineering, and technology to provide essential processes for anthropological analysis and interpretation.