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Dr Clare Melhuish
Principal Research Fellow
UCL Urban Laboratory
Faculty of the Built Environment
- Joined UCL
- 1st Jul 2013
Research summary
Teaching summary
I offer PhD supervision in the anthropology of architecture, the built environment and urban processes; ethnography of architectural practice; urban and architectural visual and material culture; postcolonial urbanism; critical urban heritage; modern(ist) architecture and planning in London; French modern(ist) architecture and planning; Arab cities; Caribbean urbanism; universities and urban regeneration; education spaces and the city; participatory and community-led planning; anthropology of home and domestic space; ethnographic methodologies. I currently supervise nine students as primary supervisor, and two as secondary supervisor, of whom two are in CRS.
I am a co-convenor on the MSc Urban Studies programme in UCL Geography, and I also contribute dissertation supervision on that programme and on the MA in Architectural History and Theory in the Bartlett School of Architecture, and contribute ad hoc teaching to a number of urban programmes at UCL
I am a programme co-convenor of Urban Lab's MASc Global Urbanism programme at UCL East, and co-convene a pair of modules on it, Histories of Global London 1900 to the present 1 and 2 (formerly part of MA in Architecture and Historic Urban Environments in the Bartlett School of Architecture). These two interlinked 15-credit modules assess urban heritage as a social, cultural and economic asset in complex multicultural/postcolonial cities, and position the capital’s global histories and population flows as central to a critical understanding of its urban heritage and futures. I also contribute three case study sessions on the city of Kingston Jamaica to Cities Studio module.
I taught for a number of years on the Ethnographic Ways of Knowing module in the MArch at University of Westminster, and prior to that contributed to the PhD programme at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and taught a course in the General Studies programme of the Architectural Association, London, on Architecture and Anthropology.
Education
- Brunel University
- Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 2008
- University College London
- Other higher degree, Master of Arts | 2001
- University of Cambridge
- First Degree, Bachelor of Arts | 1985
Biography
I am Head of Department/Director and Principal Research Fellow in UCL Urban Laboratory, a newly created cross-disciplinary department of The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment since August 2021, and prior to that a cross-faculty platform for urban research and teaching at UCL since 2005, with an administrative base in the Bartlett since 2011.
I have been Director of Urban Lab since 2018, having joined in 2013 to undertake research on university-led urban regeneration linked to the early planning of the UCL East campus development project in east London. Since the opening of this new campus in autumn 2022, we have also launched our new Urban Room space for public-facing research-based activities, and connected MASc programme in Global Urbanism on the One Pool Street site in the former Olympic Park.
Alongside my research on universities as actors in urban regeneration, I have led on a number of cross-disciplinary urban heritage research programmes and activities within Urban Lab, focusing on postcolonial and decolonial urban contexts. Linked to this research area, I co-convene the module Histories of Global London 1900 to the present, and contribute to the Cities Studio module on MASc Global Urbanism.
Prior to joining UCL, I was a Visiting Research Fellow in Anthropology at Brunel University, and worked on a series of research projects in the Geography departments of the Open University (Architectural atmospheres, branding and the social: the role of digital visualizing technologies in contemporary architectural practice, led by Prof Gillian Rose and Dr Monica Degen, funded by the ESRC); Kings College London (Arts-led Regeneration, with Prof Loretta Lees, as part of an AHRC Connected Communities bid); and Queen Mary University of London (Gender and the Built Environment, led by Prof Alison Blunt and funded by Urban Buzz); as well as the Centre for Teaching and Learning in Design (CETLD) at Brighton University and Centre for Teaching and Learning in Creativity (CETLC) at Sussex University (joint project implementing ethnographic approaches to evaluating impact of learning space design, led by Dr Jos Boys).
I completed my PhD in Social Anthropology at Brunel University in 2008 ('Inhabiting the image: architecture and social identity in the post-industrial city. The case of the Brunswick, London', funded by AHRB), and obtained an MA in Material Culture with Distinction in the Department of Anthropology at UCL in 2001, following a career as an architectural journalist, critic, author and curator. My undergraduate degree was in History (pt 1) and History of Art (pt 2) at Christ’s College Cambridge.