Susie West graduated as an archaeologist with a strong interest in standing buildings and cultural theory. Her PhD was an interdisciplinary project on private libraries in country houses of the long eighteenth century. It was an attempt to unit book history with architectural history. After working for English Heritage on their historic property portfolio, she joined the OU in May 2007 to work on the new Heritage Studies courses.
Her research interests centre on the English country house, its landscape setting, and private libraries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Current projects include Bess of Hardwick and her material achievements, an edited book on Penshurst Place, Kent, and finishing her book on country house libraries.
Heritage Studies at the OU is brings together existing strengths across departments, investigating how we work with the past in the present, from museum and gallery displays to fiercely contested struggles over land, faith and identity.. Susie is concentrating on the official structures that shape access and understanding of heritage: UN and government systems that create ‘official’ heritage and its formal interpretation. She is chair of the second level module AD281 Understanding Global Heritage, which is an introduction to critical approaches to how we choose and use ‘objects of heritage’, from memories to monuments. She is editor of Understanding Heritage in Practice (Manchester University Press and The Open University, 2010), in the series Understanding Global Heritage for AD281. She is a member of the Eighteenth-century Visual Cultures research group, the interfaculty Heritage Studies Research Group and the Material Culture Research Group.
She would be willing to supervise research students on aspects of seventeenth and eighteenth-century British architectural history, landscape history, and book history, as well as British heritage topics touching on the historic environment, interpretation and sustainability.
Susie is the administrator for and regular contributor to the Art History and Heritage blog [www.open.ac.uk/blogs/ahh/].
View my Flickr gallery curated as part of my conference paper presented at Re-appraising the Neo-Georgian 1880-1970, An International Conference organised by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, English Heritage, The Open University and the Twentieth Century Society, 6-7 May 2011: Neo-Georgian London <http://flic.kr/y/gMfURZ>
Understanding heritage in practice, Manchester University Press/The Open University, 2010
Find out more about this book
Hardwick Old Hall (guidebook), English Heritage, 2008
Prudhoe Castle, (guidebook), English Heritage, 2006
The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Britain from 1550, co-editor with Sarah Tarlow, Routledge, 1999
‘Ancestral renown, Penshurst Place, Kent, Part II’, Country Life (2005:6) February 9, 2011, 52-9
‘Home of science, The Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1’ Country Life (204:43) November 3, 2010, 62-6
‘Heritage, landscape and memory’, with Sabelo Ndlovu, in T. Benton ed., Understanding heritage and memory, Manchester University Press and The Open University, 2010, 202-237
‘Heritage and class’, in R. Harrison ed, Understanding the Politics of Heritage, Manchester University Press and The Open University, 2010, 270-304
Book review, ‘Annabel Ricketts. The English Country House Chapel: Building a Protestant Tradition’ in Journal of British Studies, 48:3, 2009, 753-4
‘Hardwick Old Hall’, Country Life (102:13) March 27, 2008, 84-7
‘Print, manuscript and the search for order 1450-1830, David McKitterick,’ Reviews in History February 2004 (www.history.ac.uk/reviews)
‘An overlooked inventory for Blickling Hall, Norfolk’, Library History, 19, 2003, 143-5
‘Studies and status: spaces for books in seventeenth-century Penshurst Place, Kent’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 12, 2002, 266-92
‘Tales from the book room: interdisciplinary approaches to country house libraries and their books’, in The Country House in Contemporary Research and Conservation, York 1999, Brandenburg Technical University, Cottbus, Germany, 2001 CD-Rom
‘Rare Books and Rare Women: gender and private libraries 1660-1830’, in E. Kerslake and N. Moody eds, Gendering Library History, John Moores University Press, 2000, 179-195
‘Introduction’, in Sarah Tarlow and Susie West eds, 1999, 1-15
‘Social Space and the English Country House’, in Sarah Tarlow and Susie West eds, 1999, 103-122
