Eleanor Quasebarth Neil has been awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), where she will develop her monograph Local Communities in Excavations of Lost Cities: Knowledge, Power, and Collaboration in Cyprus. The monograph is part of her position as postdoctoral researcher on the Lost Cities Rediscovered project, led by Rubina Raja. The monograph will examine how archaeological knowledge in Cyprus has been shaped through historically entangled relationships among local communities, imperial agents, scholarly institutions, and the press, and how these dynamics continue to inform archaeological practice today.

Set against the backdrop of Cyprus’s ongoing political division (contemporary and historical), the book explores how archaeology and cultural heritage have often reinforced separation rather than fostered shared understanding. By tracing the role of community engagement in knowledge production from nineteenth-century Ottoman Cyprus to the present, the research foregrounds the contributions and agency of local actors whose roles have frequently been marginalised or overlooked. In doing so, it develops a historically grounded framework for ethical collaboration, multivocality, and decolonising practice in the Eastern Mediterranean.

During her fellowship, Eleanor will also contribute to CRASSH’s interdisciplinary community through a case-based discussion series on research in contested landscapes. She will also be presenting a Research Practice Seminar on integrating 18th- and 19th-century publications into contemporary archaeological fieldwork. Specifically, the travel writing of Giovanni Mariti and the later antiquarian work of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, and how they can be integrated into the analysis of contemporary work at Erimi-Pitharka. Pitharka is a Late Bronze Age site in the Limassol district of Cyprus, which is currently being excavated under the auspices of the Moesgaard Museum and directed by Lærke Recht, and of which Eleanor is a team member.